Acceso usuarios
Cornelia Müller, Gerald Speckmann
This paper is concerned with a Cuban gesture that expresses a negative assessment and which is used typically in conjunction with speech. This gesture displays a rapid movement of the relaxed hand that resembles the everyday activity of wiping-off dirt from clothes. Based on micro-analytic studies of naturalistic conversations in Cuba it is shown that the ‘wiping-off’ gesture appears to be used syntactically and semantically as evaluative particle and adjective. It is further documented that from a sequential point of view wiping-off gestures are used as previews aand follow-ups of verbally exposed negative assessments, however they tend not to be synchronized with verbal assessments. Finally, it is argued that the wiping-off gesture is an example of a group of gestures that etymologically derives communicative activities from practical actions.
