McNeill’s gestural study on viewpoints

In his study on gesture in narrative data in Hand and Mind (1992), McNeill contended that viewpoint is one area of meanings where gesture can co-express with speech. He was the first scholar to make a systematic study of viewpoints in resources other than language, and pointed out that viewpoints can be conveyed gesturally. He

focused on how viewpoints can be inferred from iconic gestures, and identified observer viewpoint and character viewpoint whereby the present study is also based on. In his narrative data, he further found that 60% of iconic gestures have O-VPT, and 40% have C-VPT. The percentage of the occurrences of observer viewpoint in gesture is higher than character viewpoint when speakers are narrating stories.

The results of the present study, different from McNeill’s findings, come out to suggest that the percentage of the distribution of C-VPT in gesture is higher than that of O-VPT. Despite the fact that O-VPT is also commonly seen in speakers’ use of the speech-accompanying gesture in depicting third-person past events (see Table 9, O-VPT, 43.7%), C-VPT is nevertheless the most frequently expressed viewpoint in gesture. With the five gestural features identified as distinctive criteria—gestural space, handedness, stroke duration, frequency, and the involvement of other parts of the body within the performance of a gesture interact and collaborate with each other, the current study finds that the distributions of O-VPT and C-VPT in the gestural channel in the descriptions of third-person past events in conversational contexts are very different from the distributional pattern of gestural viewpoints as suggested by McNeill in his narrative data.

In McNeill’s gestural study on viewpoints, he mainly focused on how observer and character viewpoint can be inferred from iconic gestures. However, the present

study has shown that viewpoints can also be represented and expressed through other types of gestures. In the current data, speakers make use of iconic, metaphoric, and spatial gestures in company with speech in talking about third-person past events.

These different types of gesture, with the five gestural features and their interaction, can also manifest and represent O-VPT and C-VPT. Despite the fact that iconic gestures are still the major gesture type produced in the current data, metaphoric and spatial gestures are also produced in speakers’ descriptions of third-person past events in expressing viewpoints. In addition, the distribution of the different types of gesture in representing the three viewpoints comes out to suggest that 92.1% of C-VPT in gesture are represented through iconic gestures. On the other hand, metaphoric and spatial gestures are performed most often to express O-VPT. With regard to S-VPT, all four cases in the current data are represented through metaphoric gestures. These findings concerning how different viewpoints could be manifested through different gesture types have not been brought up in McNeill’s gestural study on viewpoints.

While McNeill’s main focus is on how viewpoints can be represented through gestures, he also provided linguistic manifestations of viewpoints. In his quantitative study on viewpoints, he generalized that the C-VPT gesture tends to appear with transitive verbs and single clause sentences, and the O-VPT gesture with intransitive or stative verbs and complex sentences. In the C-VPT gesture, speakers walk into the

scene of the narrative and insert themselves into the gestural space. In the linguistic parallel there are single clauses and transitive verbs that also function to represent the speakers as walking into the events narrated. With a single clause, “there is a minimal grammatical separation of the event from the speaker” (1992:120). With a transitive verb, the events being narrated are as if under magnification. In terms of an O-VPT, speakers’ use of the speech-accompanying gesture depicts the narrated events as if the speakers are outside of the events. Linguistically, intransitive or stative verbs which allow speakers to keep some distance from the events appear correspondingly with O-VPT gestures. McNeill further suggested that it is through gestural manifestation that linguistic manifestation may be made obvious and clear. Without the speech-accompanying gestures, these linguistic forms that are also capable of conveying viewpoints are unobvious and it is hard to draw any attention to them.

Despite the fact that McNeill also acknowledged that the correspondence between gestural and linguistic manifestations with regard to the same viewpoint is not always definite, the speech-gesture co-expressions of the same viewpoint are pretty much correspondent in terms of the distance from the narratives. Following this view, McNeill’s study suggested that speech and gesture often co-express the same viewpoint in narratives.

However, the investigation of the joint expressions of viewpoints in both the

linguistic and gestural modalities come out to suggest that speakers’ use of the speech-accompanying gestures tend to convey different viewpoints from that conveyed in the language within the descriptions of the same event. Mismatching of viewpoints in language and gesture accounts for 64.7% of all cases, which is more commonly seen than matching cases where gesture works in collaboration with language in expressing the same viewpoint. This finding is also different from McNeill’s study, where he suggested that speech and gesture often co-express the same viewpoint.

In sum, the present study differs from McNeill’s gestural study on viewpoints in two respects. First, concerning the distributions of O-VPT and C-VPT gestures, the current study finds that C-VPT is more commonly expressed in speakers’ descriptions of third-person past events within conversational contexts than O-VPT in gesture.

Second, in terms of the collaborative expressions of viewpoints in language and gesture, the current study suggests that while speakers’ speech-accompanying gestures collaborate with the speech in expressing viewpoints when talking about third-person past events, gestures more often convey viewpoints that are different from those conveyed in language in the descriptions of the same event. Though McNeill has contended that “one area of meaning where speech and gesture are coexpressive is the point of view” (1992:118), the two modalities might not always work in collaboration

in conveying the same viewpoint.