Semantics and pragmatics of symbolic gestures

The chapter defines symbolic gestures as autonomous culturally codified gestures to which a canonical verbal phrasing corresponds in a given culture. Examples of iconic and arbitrary gestures are given, and a way is proposed to measure a gesture’s iconicity, based on how much its parameters still imitate the referent’s shape, location, orientation or movement. A proto-grammatical distinction is made between holophrastic gestures, that convey the meaning of a whole sentence, and articulated ones, corresponding to single words, and the Italian holophrastic gesture of the “tulip hand”, with its meanings as a true and a rhetorical question, is analyzed. Then several cases of rhetorical figures in gestures are illustrated: metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, hyperbole, irony, allusion, dysphemism. Finally, the chapter presents a protocol for the construction of a gestionary, a dictionary of symbolic gestures, that encompasses information on a gesture’s verbal formulation, contexts, synonyms, semantic content, semantic, pragmatic and grammatical classification, and rhetorical figures.