hellog〜英語史ブログ / 2021-12-23

■ #4623. ジェスチャーとは何か？ [gesture][paralinguistics][terminology][psycholinguistics][origin_of_language][sign_language][kinesics]

　ジェスチャー (gesture) は言語そのものではないが，言語と同期することも多く，心理言語学や社会言語学などの分野では重要な研究対象となっている．とりわけ近年では「マルティモーダル分析」 (multimodal analysis) と呼ばれる，パラ言語的要素 (paralinguistics) を統合的に観察する手法が編み出されてきている，ジェスチャーは，言語の起源 (origin_of_language)，手話 (sign_language)，普遍言語といった話題とも接点があり，言語学との結びつきは強い．実際，目下読み進めている言語学史のハンドブックで，ジェスチャー研究の歴史に1章が割かれている．Kendon (71) より，意外と緩い「ジェスチャー」の定義・解説を引いておきたい．

'Gesture' here refers to the wide variety of ways in which humans, through visible bodily action, give expression to their thoughts and feelings, draw attention to things, describe things, greet each other, or engage in ritualized actions as in religious ceremonies. 'Gesture' includes the movements of the body, especially of the hands and arms, often integrated with spoken expression; the use of manual actions, often conventionalized, to convey something without speech; or the manual and facial actions employed in sign languages. All this is part of 'gesture', broadly conceived. Expressions such as laughing and crying, blushing, clenching the teeth in anger, and the like, or bodily postures and attitudes sustained during occasions of interaction, are less likely to be so considered. 'Gesture' is not a well-defined category. Although there is a core of phenomena, such as those mentioned, to which the term is usually applied without dispute, it is not possible to establish clear boundaries to the domain of its application, and some writers are inclined to include a much wider range of phenomena than do others.

　本ブログでは「#2921. ジェスチャーの分類」 ([2017-04-26-1]) でジェスチャーの話題を取り上げたことがある程度で私も門外漢だ．そこでふと思ったのだが，歴史ジェスチャー学というものは存在するのだろうか．例えば演劇のパフォーマンス，写本図像，絵本などの資料などから，それらしい研究が成り立つのだろうか．

　・ Kendon, Adam. "History of the Study of Gesture." Chapter 3 of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics. Ed. Keith Allan. Oxford: OUP, 2013. 71--89.

[ 固定リンク | 印刷用ページ ]