Recurrent gestures throughout bodies, languages, and cultural practices

Abstract

Abstract In gesture studies, the adjective ‘recurrent’ has developed to distinguish a range of semiotic and conceptual phenomena concerning the nature of meaningful bodily movements. This article begins with a brief and recent history of recurrent gesture studies. We raise ongoing debates concerning the position of recurrent gestures on the so-called Kendon’s continuum, the relation between gestures and practical actions, and the interplay between gesture’s cultural specificity and universality. A selection of findings from previous research on recurrent gestures then acquaints readers with characteristics of these gestures: their form-function pairings and context-variation, linguistic organization and multimodal constructions, and community-specific typologies (from cultural, situational, as well as individual perspectives). Proposing to help build recurrent gesture theory, the paper then recognizes that recurrency goes hand-in-hand with diversity – both in the ways these gestures exist for members of a community and their role in the styles, habits, and creations of individuals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.