Gesture and the Poetics of Prose

Abstract

Pointing Deictic gestures, or points, have obvious function of indicating objects around narrator, but they also play a part in narrations there is nothing objectively present to point at. Although gesture space may look empty, to speaker it is filled with discourse entities. Deictic gestures establish in space participants of a narrative and participant events. An example of former is a speaker who said, the artist and Alice are by, pointing first to his right and then straight in front of him, before making an iconic gesture for walking by. An example of latter comes from a speaker who asked his interlocutor, Where did you come from before? and accompanied that with pointing vaguely to one side (Figure 5). The specific kind of abstract pointing to be discussed below often occurs at beginning of new narrative episodes and scenes, it is dominant gesture. In this context, pointing may mark establishment of a new focus space (Grosz 1981). In narrations of cartoon stories, about three-quarters of all clauses are accompanied by gestures of one kind or another; of these, about forty percent are iconic, forty percent are beats, and remaining ten percent are divided between deictic and metaphoric gestures. In narrating films, proportions of metaphoric and deictic gestures increase at expense of iconic gestures (statistics from McNeill and Levy 1982; McNeill [forthcoming]). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:04:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 386 Poetics Today 12:3 Figure 5. An abstract pointing gesture with where did you come from before? (speaker on left). III. Function of Gestures in Narratology