Gestures We Live By

Download or read book Gestures We Live By written by Lluís Payrató and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines emblems (or emblematic gestures) from a pragmatic view, that is to say, as autonomous gestures that fulfill communicative functions, embody illocutionary values, and act as signals of cognitive relevance. Emblems are conceived as multimodal tools on the frontier between verbal and nonverbal modes, and are part of the communicative repertoire of individuals and sociocultural groups. Emblems constitute clear cases of embodiment and are susceptible to many processes of metaphorization (contrasting or not with verbal metaphors), metonymy, and interference between modalities. The applications of emblematic analysis are numerous, from lexicography to second language learning, or to natural language processing.