Negation’s familiar dynamics and vocal-entangled gestures

Dr. Simon Harrison
Assistant Professor
Department of English
City University of Hong Kong

***All are welcome***

Abstract:
This presentation will explore the familiar dynamics from which negative spoken utterances often materialize and that our bodies attune with when speaking together. These utterances and gestures can be transcribed (e.g., “there wasn’t any fraud in the elections” said with hands wagging side-to-side), while familiar dynamics are what might be felt or sensed as bodily resonance and intercorporeality. Combining linguistics research with gesture studies and visualisation software, I shift scale from spoken language utterances to the entanglement of acoustic and kinaesthetic phenomena from which they arise. This can be illustrated, for example, with the correspondence of sound lengthening, pitch increase, and gestural adjustments at the onset of negative items like “not” and “nothing”.

Bio:
Simon Harrison’s gesture research explores embodied and relational understandings of language, communication, and culture across diverse settings and scales. He is author of The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect and Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China.