Meaning Potentials in Words and Gestures

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of what and how gestures and speech, respectively, contribute to the construction of meaning. A point of departure of is the notion of “meaning potential” which we apply to both unimodal gestures and unimodal vocalverbal units, as well as to multimodal vocal-gestural units, [1]. The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of ”meaning potential”, not only for speech, but also for gesture. Specifically, we want to discuss the possibilities of extending the notion of a meaning potential for a symbolic sign (e.g. a word) to iconic and indexical signs.