On the diachronic aspect of gestural communication

Abstract

Modern studies of gesturing conclusively prove that a gestural communication system accompanies oral speech the units of which, like linguistic ones, can be described using a limited set of reproducible features assigned to certain classes and correlated with certain contexts of use. The diachronic aspect of gesturing has been little studied, although there is an understanding that human gesture behaviour, like speech, changes in space, time as well as under the influence of changing sociocultural conditions. Changes in the gestural system usually refer to innovations, the emergence of new gestures. It is much more difficult to describe the gestures that have gone or are going out of use since due to the lack of video recording they have to be restored from descriptions preserved in literature. Examples of gestures that have recently entered the Russian gestural system as well as examples of gestures that have gradually become obsolete are considered in this work. The data of the Multimodal Russian Corpus and some other corpora within the Russian National Corpus (RNC) used in this survey enable a clarification of the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the gestures and changes in their use to be tracked.