La propuesta del desarrollo sustentable 60 : los inicios de la discusión

Usually, the meaning of a gesture is strictly connected to its form, but there are cases in which gestures forms and meanings are disconnected from each other, for example in the case of gestures that are used to indicate something about the speaker’s attitude to the referential meaning or to help the listener interpret the framework in which the speaker wants that utterance to be understood. To indicate these gesture functions (and in order to distinguish them from the referential ones) Kendon (2004) uses the term pragmatic function relating them to Efron’s logical-discursive category. According to Kendon, there are four main kinds of pragmatic function:

1. Modal function: the gesture modifies the frame in which what is being said has to be interpreted. In other cases, the modal function of a gesture indicates whether speakers are talking about a hypothesis or a fact they believe is concrete.

2. Performative function: the gesture is used to indicate the kind of speech act or interactional move a person in engaging in. For example, if a person performs a gesture moving a palm up-open hand towards their interlocutor, this movement may be indicating that what is being said is being ‘offered’ or ‘proposed’ to the interlocutor. 3. Parsing function: the gesture is used as a punctuation of speech, or is marking its logical

components. Beats, for example, are described by McNeill (1992) as simple rhythmic hand movements that can mark new information in contrast to given information in a specific speech context. This kind of gestures can also function as a cohesive action that allows the speaker to show logical connections between different parts of the whole discourse. Other gestures can convey the contrast between different temporal references (Kendon, 2004; Valbonesi et al. 2002): a simple gesture can indicate whether the speaker is referring to background information, to the exact moment in which the discourse is developing, or to a future moment. Another important role of gestures occurring in natural conversations studied by Kendon (1995) is that they can actually help to distinguish discourse marking functions such as differentiating a topic from a comment or help specify which is a fundamental part of the speech and which is not.

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4. Interactive function: gestures can be used as a way to indicate the recipient of a specific utterance, who claims the role of speaker (even if they are actually not speaking in that exact moment) and when they are passing the turn to talk to another interlocutor, for example by pointing at them. The interactive functions of gestures have often been acknowledged (Kaulfers, 1931; Goodwin, 1981; Streek and Hartege, 1992) but their important role for what concerns different aspects of a conversational interchange management has been recognized and systematically discussed only in the last decades. Bavelas et al. (1992) not only recognized this function but actually distinguished a separate gesture category, which she called “interactive gestures”, referring to those gestures that seem to cross-reference the matter of a speaker’s utterance to the main argument of the conversation, to show the participant’s understanding of what is being said by the speaker, and manage the turn distribution in a communication exchange (Bavelas et al 1992, 1995; Bavelas, 2008).

On the other hand, gestures can actually provide also a visible indication of different levels of discourse structure and have a helping role in the management of the interaction between speakers. In fact, besides accompanying a verbal utterance, gestures may actually be a part of its referential content. In the example shown in Fig. 3, in the utterance “When you knock something down/ you don’t throw it away/…”, the gestures “knock down” and “throw away” are defined as referential because they make actual reference to the actions they describe. Various attempts have been made to classify referential gestures (see, for example, Mandel, 1977; Kendon, 1980; Poggi & Magno Caldognetto, 1997; Calbris, 1990) and, even if they present differences from one another, they all share a division between three main kinds of strategies that are used to perform referential gestures:

1. Modelling: whenever a body part is used as if it was a model for some object. For example, a hand can be shaped so that it resembles the object or a relationship with the object the speaker is talking about.

2. Enactment (or pantomime): when the speaker uses a pattern of action that has features in common with some actual pattern of action that is being referring to. For example, a speaker that is talking about cutting a tree might move their hands as if they were actually holding an axe.

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3. Depiction: when the hands, usually previously shaped in different ways according to what is being depicted by the speaker, are engaged in creating an object in the air, sculpting or drawing the shape of something.

The recognition of referential gestures requires an understanding of the contexts in which they are produced and of the relationship with them; these contexts are usually provided by the co- occurring speech. In fact, it would be impossible to be sure of the meaning of the axe enactment presented before, if the speaker did not clarify the context verbally.

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