Foot gestures: description of a list
Abstract
Following a linguistic approach of gesture studies, this paper presents a case that bears witness to the robustness of gesture. It describes a listing procedure, recurrent in discourse organization, which consists in the production of a sequence of units characterised by syntactic, prosodic and gestual parallelism. In this example the speaker (a victim of Thalidomide) has no upper limbs, but he gesticulates with his feet. The analysis of the modalities involved in the listing activity will show that feet gestures can assume the functions performed by manual gestures. The example points out not only the tight link between gesture and speech, but also the embodiment of the listing activity, resulting from the necessity to index ideas or objects to the real world.
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