Gesture and conversational units

Speech is packaged in prosodic units (called intonation phrases or tone units) in order to facilitate information processing. Gesture phrases can be seen as visible corollaries to intonation phrases. They derive their functions from their specific performance and their particular relation to prosodic and syntactic features of the ongoing or projected utterance. In section 2.1 kinesic features of gesture-phrases and gesture units are described. Temporal relationships between gesture and speech are addressed in section 2.2, showing that gestures’ strokes are related to the nucleus of tone units without necessarily being exactly synchronized with it. Functions of gestures as integral parts of utterances are discussed in section 3: In coordination with syntactic and intonation units, gesture phrases and gesture units serve information processing (see section 3.1). Another function of gesture is turn-construction (see section 3.2) as well as the organization of turn-taking (see section 3.3). Recognition of gesture leads to a revision of central concepts in interaction analysis, e.g., the notion of speaker and hearer as well as the conversation analytic conceptualization of turn-constructional units and transition relevance places. These, along with open research questions, are addressed in section 4.