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5 - From the Neck Up: Facial Gestures in Dialogue

from Part I - Gestural Types: Forms and Functions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2024

By
Nicole Chovil
Edited by
Alan Cienki
Alan Cienki
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
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Summary

Gestures of the face have a relatively limited presence in scholarly gesture discourses. The use of facial movements as intentional communication has been historically undermined in facial behavior research. The face has been primarily studied as expressions of emotion, traditionally theorized as involuntary signs of internal affective states. Emotion expressions are differentiated from facial movements that serve conversational functions in face-to-face dialogue. The facial gestures presented in this chapter illustrate the flexibility and diversity of meanings conveyed by facial communicative actions. Gestures can refer to affective events not present in the immediate here and now, communicate understanding of another individual’s affective experience, and convey information about a target referent. Other facial gestures have counterparts in hand gestures with similar pragmatic and semantic functions. The study of facial gestural components of linguistic communicative events is important to the construction of a comprehensive model of language.

Keywords

cospeech facial gesturesface-to-face dialoguecommunicative actslanguage usereferentialconarrativenegationshrugsthinking facepragmaticiconic
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies , pp. 112 - 130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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