Here’s some 1-2 minute gesture exercises I drew. I used a random generator to pick an animal, which was a badger, and then I put it into the poses I saw. Hope ya like them! :D
#Bodylanguage is defined as the non-#verbal #communication between two individuals or a group of individuals through physical #behaviors such as #limb #movements, #facial expressions, #eye movements, other bodily #gestures and #postures.
Today, the term has assumed so much importance and prominence in all spheres of life that without a #positive body language, none of us can #survive in the professional arena, personal lives, and in the world, in #general.
Body language comes into #picture not only during normal conversations, but also during formal #discussions, #interviews, group discussions, panel #meetings, etc. #Proper body language not only #conveys the #right message to the recipient, but also #attracts or #repels the #recipient.
The Clemency of Augustus François André Vincent (French; 1746–1816) ca. 1787–88 Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, over traces of red chalk; perspective lines in graphite The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The artist here depicts the concluding scene of Pierre Corneille’s 1641 play, Cinna
Air quote gestures are weird. They’re weird because they have a really specific form and a specific use and meaning for people who use them. Most gestures that have these features are in a category of ‘emblems’, things like a thumbs up (), please sign (✌️) or fingers crossed (). All of these emblems have a meaning and use even if there’s no speech. Air quotes, in contrast, need speech to make sense. So they’re weird.
They’re so weird I’ve been thinking about them since writing an undergraduate research paper about fifteen years ago. I had always planned to build a larger corpus, collect more data and say something more definitive about these gestures, but it’s been a decade and a half and I haven’t yet, so I thought I’d drag out that old paper and share some of the observations from it.
The earliest reference of this gesture that I found for that paper appears in the July 1927 edition of Science. S. Francis Howard wrote to the magazine of how a ‘very intelligent young woman’ he knew ’[raised] both hands above her head with the first and second finger pointing upwards’ (Howard 1927, p. 38) in order to indicate that she was quoting text.
Air quotes haven’t received a lot of attention. Bäuml and Bäuml define the air quotes as a gesture of disassociation, whereby speaker who uses the gesture makes a value judgement about the credibility of the accompanying speech (Bäuml & Bäuml 1997, p. 153). Cirillo (2019) analysed a corpus of academic presentations for the use of air quotes (190 examples from 346 presentations). She found they exhibited a relatively stable form and were used to show the speaker’s stance towards the content being marked.
I looked at a mini corpus of 32 examples of air quotes from Australian television between 1993 and 2007 (ie. I watched a lot of tv and used this as a justification). Here are some observations from this data:
Air quotes have a stable form: two hands, palms outward, and somewhere between the upper chest and eye level.
There was some variation: some speakers did not so much pulse the fingers as wiggle them backwards and forwards.
2 finger air quotes are more common than 1 finger, but they also occur.
Air quotes are found with a wide variety of lexical content, including verbs, adverbs, adjectives and nouns, and longer phrases.
For noun phrases, if there was a determiner it was never included in the scope of the quote mark gesture in this corpus.
The average section of speech accompanied by quote mark gestures was only 1-3 words long, and comprises of generally no more than 4 syllables. The performance of the gesture for longer phrases would terminate before the end of the phrase it had scope over. For example the gesture was only performed with the words “I love public” in the spoken phrase “I love public broadcasting”.
Sometimes the number of pulses of air quotes followed the syllables in the speech, sometimes the number of words. Some were harder to determine, so there was no clear answer as to what people are aligning the performance of the gesture to.
In this small corpus, air quotes had four functions; reported speech, sarcasm, distancing and emphasis - or a combination of these.
It’s really nice that a lot of what I observed in this small study aligns with Cirillo‘s much larger and more detailed study.
In terms of categories, at the end of the short paper, I suggested that maybe air quotes fits with Kendon’s (1995, 2004) category of ‘pragmatic gestures’ - a category of gestures that are used alongside speech and mark the discourse level rather than the content level. For example, the ‘ring gesture’ is often used to show precision or specificity of a point being made in Western discourse Neumann (2004). Cirillo also suggests that air quotes might be a pragamtic category, but notes that their origin as a feature of writing makes them particularly unique. It’s been fun to dig up this old work, and even though I won’t get to revisit it, I’ll still continue to appreciate the weirdness of air quote gestures.
Thanks to Lou-Ann Kleppa, whose email make me go back and dig up this old paper!
References
Bäuml, B. J., & Bäuml, F. H. (1997). Dictionary of worldwide gestures (2nd ed.). Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Cirillo, L. (2019). The pragmatics of air quotes in English academic presentations. Journal of Pragmatics,142, 1-15.
Howard, S. F. (1927). Quotations. In Science, 66 (1697), 38.
Kendon, A. (1995). Gestures as illucutionary and discourse structure markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of pragmatics, 23, 247-279.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neumann, R. (2004). The conventionalization of the Ring Gesture in German discourse. In C. Müller & R. Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures (pp. 217-224). Weidler: Buchverlag.
