Prof. Dr. Jürgen Streeck 

University of Texas at Austin

Hand gestures as resources and residues of cooperative interaction

In my presentation I lay out an empirical theory of the roles and emergence of hand gestures in cooperative interaction. In the first part, I describe the different ways in which gestures relate to, structure, and make sense of the communicative situation. The second section is devoted to one particular mode of gesturing, which I call ‘conceptual gesture’ or ‘conceptual action’. In the third part, I present a hypothesis about the emergence of ‘conventionalized’ (or recurrent) conceptual gestures, that is, gestures that have become ‘common currency’