Dia: 3 de juny del 2024
Hora: 12.30 h
Lloc: aula 52.737 - 7a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF, i també en línia. 

Resum: 
Gestures associated with negation have figured prominently in the development of contemporary gesture studies, attracting attention within diverse strands of cognitive-semiotic, psycholinguistic, social interaction, and anthropological research. In this presentation, I contribute new perspectives on these typologically widespread gestures by integrating discoveries in biomechanics research with empirical findings from a linguistic gesture study. Analysing negative utterances comprising accented particle, lateral sweep gesture, and facial expression found in American English televised dialogues, I found that as syllable-onset consonant is lengthening (voiced alveolar /n/ = 300ms on average) with pitch and intensity increasing (e.g., “nnnnnNEVER”), the speaker’s upper arm is rotating with palm pronating/adducing while his or her face is distorting. Inferring attested biomechanical processes leads to an ‘entangled’ view of these patterns, evoking dynamic relations of forelimb motion and vocal-respiratory systems to explain their source and meaning. Doing so can open gestures associated with negation to different theories of language (as ecological, distributed) as well as raise new questions for future research, such as comparing typologically-distinct languages.