How Hand Gestures Contribute to Action Ascription

Abstract

This article investigates the embodied achievement of intersubjectivity by analyzing depictive gestures that are produced during the final components of the ongoing verbal TCU and extended into the following turn transition space. The depictive gestures in focus elaborate the TCUs by providing additional information on the verbal content of the turn. They may, for example, provide a visual representation of an action that is referred to in the verbal TCU, depict details that are not referred to in talk, or perform bodily enactments that model projected next actions. The analysis demonstrates that timed in this way, the gestures contribute to the multimodal action package that they are part of in a specific way: They work to secure the recognizability of the ongoing action and enhance coparticipants’ possibilities to produce the relevant next actions. In this way the gestures support action ascription. The data are in Finnish with English translations.