Barack Obama, being sharp
Indexical order in the pragmatics of precision-grip gesture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12824446 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Lempert (0000-0003-4981-549X, University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 241-270 |
| Publication date | 2011-12-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| 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.11.3.01lem |
| OpenAlex | W2045601420 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 32 |
Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, for the way it purportedly can indicate qualities of speaker and materialize acts of persuasion — functions famously addressed in Quintilian’s classic writings but understudied today. I revisit this problematic through a case study of precision-grip (especially thumb to tip of forefinger) in Barack Obama’s debate performances (2004–2008). Cospeech gesture can index valorized attributes of speaker — not directly but through orders of semiotic motivation. In terms of first-order indexicality, precision-grip highlights discourse in respect of information structure, indicating focus. In debate, precision grip has undergone a degree of conventionalization and has reemerged as a second-order pragmatic resource for performatively “making a ‘sharp’, effective point.” Repetitions and parallelisms of precision grip in debate can, in turn, exhibit speaker-attributes, such as being argumentatively ‘sharp’, and from there may even partake in candidate branding
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Focus (optics · Gesture · Indexicality · Linguistics · Multimodality · Order (exchange · Semiotics · Sociology · Thumb · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology
The strategic self
Agency
Corrective feedback, gesture, and mediation in classroom language learning
“The denigration of Korean men’s genitals”
Observing ‘one of our own’
Development of sensitivity to beat gesture and contrastive accenting in support of word learning in early childhood in boys and girls
Beyond Foreigner Talk
Taking a stance through stance
What’s the point of Donald Trump? Deictic gestures in the service of right-wing populism
The multimodal construction of political personae through the strategic management of semiotic resources of emotion expression
Gesture and legitimation in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage
The Body as a Resource for Other-Initiation of Repair
Recurrent gestures and embodied stance-taking in courtroom opening statements
On the Pragmatic Poetry of Pose
Person-Indexing Registers, Stardom, Auteurism
Speech style as political capital
Uncommon resemblance
Using space to talk and gesture about numbers
Recurrent gestures throughout bodies, languages, and cultural practices
Gesture studies and anthropological perspectives
Handling talk
Producing and perceiving gestures conveying height or shape
Pragmatic functions of gestures
Gestures are modulated by social context
Gesture for Linguists
This is not a course in trial practice
Gesture
From mandala to flowchart
Toward the anthropology of white nationalist postracialism
Family as a framing resource for political identity construction
Doing 'being interrupted' in political talk
The hands of Donald Trump
| Unique citing works | 32 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2.46 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2026 (14) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 31 |