Towards a grammar of gesture
A comparison between the types of hand movements of the orator and the actor in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria 11.3.85–184
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12824420 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dorota Dutsch (University of California, Santa Barbara, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 259-281 |
| Publication date | 2002-12-31 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Gesture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1568-1475 • E-ISSN: 1569-9773 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/gest.2.2.07dut |
| OpenAlex | W2009785378 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 22 |
In his Institutio (11.3.85–88), Quintilian divides all human gestures into “imitative” and “natural,” with natural gestures forming a symbolic code comparable to spoken language. This language of gesture would have included hand movements equivalent to adverbs, pronouns, nouns, and verbs. Such symbolic gestures, spontaneously accompanying words, were the only ones that Quintilian recommended for the orator. The actor’s gestures, dependent as they were on the lines spoken — and not on the actor’s thoughts and feelings — could not be spontaneous. The gestures made on stage were imitative of the various categories of the natural (i.e. symbolic) gestures, or of actions of everyday life
Feeling · Gesture · Grammar · Linguistics · Natural (archaeology · Noun · Communication · Computer Science · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
Introduction
Music and Metre
Roman Comedy and the Poetics of Adaptation
Slaves and Roman Comedy
Fathers and Sons
Gods and Roman Comedy
Stage Action in Roman Comedy
Roman Comedy in Early Modern Italy and France
The Language of Roman Comedy
Roman Comedy in Germany (from Humanism to Lessing)
Roman Comedy on Stage and Screen in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Metatheatre
Roman Comedy in Early Modern England
Comic Technique
The Manuscripts and Illustration of Plautus and Terence
Mothers and Whores
The Politics of Roman Comedy
The Chiro-Phenomenology of Vilém Flusser
Hand gestures and the oratorical taskscape of Late Republican and Augustan Forum Romanum in Rome
The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy
Pragmatic functions of gestures
Gesture and language
| Citations per year | 1.16 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2007 - 2025 (19) |
| Highly cited | No |