La Trobe

‘Away’ gestures associated with negative expressions in narrative discourse in Syuba (Kagate, Nepal) speakers

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posted on 2025-03-24, 06:57 authored by Lauren GawneLauren Gawne
This article examines the formal and functional features of a recurring ‘away’ gesture in Syuba (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal). The formal properties of this gesture include a pronation of the forearms to bring the palms downward while the fingers spread away, and is most often performed with both hands. Functionally, it is found with utterances that signal negation, particularly the absence of something. A growing body of literature links ‘away’ trajectories with negation, or negative evaluation of speech content cross-linguistically. The temporal alignment between these gesture and lexical content also shows that cross-linguistic differences in word order appear to affect performance of gestures associated with negated content.

Funding

Funding for the documentation of Syuba came from to Stack Exchange, The Awesome Foundation (Ottawa), The Firebird Foundation, NTU, Singapore and The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP).

History

School

  • School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Publication Date

2021-02-04

Journal

Semiotics

Volume

239

Pagination

23p. (p.37-59)

Rights Statement

© The Authors 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, whereby credit must be given to the creator, only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted and no derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.

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