Abstract
This paper investigates the body’s role in grammar in argument sequences. Drawing from a database of public disputes on language use, we document the work of the palm-up gesture in action formation. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we show how this gesture is an interactional resource that indexes a particular epistemic stance—namely to cast the proposition being advanced as obvious. In this report, we focus on instances in which participants reach what we refer to as an ‘impasse’, at which point the palm up gesture becomes a resource for reasserting and pursuing a prior position, now laminated with an embodied claim of ‘obviousness’ that is grounded in the sequentiality of the interaction. As we show, the palm up gesture appears with and in response to a variety of syntactic and grammatical structures, and moreover can also function with no accompanying verbal utterance at all. This empirical observation challenges the assumption that a focus on grammar-in-interaction should begin with, or otherwise be examined in relation to, ‘standard’ verbal-only grammatical categories (e.g., imperative, declarative). We conclude by considering the gestural practice we focus on alongside verbal grammatical resources (specifically, particles) from typologically distinct languages, which we offer as a contribution to ongoing discussions regarding an embodied conceptualization of grammar—in this case, epistemicity.
Highlights
IntroductionAs Antaki (1994) summarizes: Social life is argumentative; and what moves an argument along is social: the topics people argue over, the content of the challenges and rebuttals, and so on
Arguments are an inevitable part of the human social experience
Shaw (2013:250) argues that the open-hand, palm-up gesture can be a resource to evaluate prior talk, or in other words, display stance. Drawing on this and Kendon (2004), we argue that the PU gesture indexes an epistemic stance in relation to the action being committed—namely, marking the proposition as obvious or redundant, about which “nothing further can be said” (Kendon 2004:265)9 In the cases presented here, participants leverage the sequentiality of interaction as the source of the ‘obviousness’ or ‘redundancy’: By taking the stance that the action they are producing should at this moment be ‘obvious’, the gesturer sequentially categorizes the recipient’s prior conduct as having been unsuccessful in terms of the action it was designed to implement
Summary
As Antaki (1994) summarizes: Social life is argumentative; and what moves an argument along is social: the topics people argue over, the content of the challenges and rebuttals, and so on. The present study examines arguments that arise in a particular social setting, namely in the context of individuals being targeted and harassed for speaking a language other than English in public in the United States. As will be seen in the data presented here, such harassment often results in a series of argumentative moves back and forth between challenger, target, and occasionally. While the specific topics debated vary from encounter to encounter, across these individual instances, challengers, targets, and bystanders are demonstrably engaged in arguments, taking oppositional stances (Du Bois 2007; Du Bois and Kärkkäinen 2012) from one another on a moment-bymoment basis in the interaction
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