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Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures
Journal of Pragmatics 143 (2019) 85e95
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Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures Anna Inbar a, *, 1, Leon Shor b, 1 a b
Tel Aviv University, Amnon VeTamar 10/3, Shoshanat HaAmaqim, 4298400, Israel Tel Aviv University, HaMatmid 30/4, Ramat Gan, 5250148, Israel
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 10 December 2018 Received in revised form 19 February 2019 Accepted 19 February 2019
The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion d namely, ‘negativity’ d rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Negation is commonly defined as a process or construction in grammatical and semantic analysis that typically expresses the contradiction of some or all of a sentence's meaning (Crystal, 2008: 323). Every human language seems to have some morphosyntactic means at its disposal to express negation, suggesting that negation is possibly one of the universal features of human language (Miestamo, 2007: 553; Horn, 2010a,b: 1). From a variety of perspectives, linguistic research has long been attempting to describe the different aspects of negation d its functional and structural properties, its role in language n, 1978; Dahl, 2010; Horn, 2010a,b; acquisition, its typological manifestations, and its neurological underpinnings (Givo Haspelmath, 2013; Serratrice and Allen, 2015; among many others). In recent years, however, the gestural realization of negation and its interface with the corresponding verbal negation have begun to receive scholarly attention. The interaction of certain gestures with verbal negation, the etymology of such gestures, and their functional description have recently been studied in several languages, such as Italian (Kendon, 2004: 248e264), English (Kendon, 2004: 248e264;
* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A. Inbar), [email protected] (L. Shor). 1 Both authors have contributed equally to this work. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.02.011 0378-2166/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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e, 2015), Russian (Grishina, 2015), Harrison, 2014a), German (Bressem and Müller, 2014), French (Harrison and Larrive Savosavo (Bressem et al., 2017), Polish (Antas and Gembalczyk, 2017), and Israeli Hebrew (Inbar, 2014; Inbar and Shor, 2017). These studies identified several gestural patterns associated with negation in various languages and showed that many of these patterns d most conspicuously the lateral headshake and various configurations of open-hand gestures d are shared by several languages and have comparable meanings and pragmatic functions.2 These findings not only suggest that these patterns constitute a culturally shared class of gestures, but also that these gestures might have a much wider cross-linguistic and cross-cultural distribution (Bressem et al., 2017: 176, 200e201). In addition, some of these studies have shown that gestures associated with negation can also accompany utterances that do not contain any explicit verbal markers of negation. These uses can be explained by assuming that these utterances involve some kind of implicit negation. Kendon (2004: 255e258), for example, mentions that Open Hand Prone gestures may accompany a description of a situation using a positive term, while implying that the same situation could have been described with a negative expression.3 The Open Hand Prone gesture can also accompany universal statements for which no exception is possible, and extreme positive assessments that imply that nothing else is as good as the evaluated object. Grishina (2015) provides a survey of contexts of covert negation in Russian, distinguishing between two subtypes: thematic covert negation and pragmatic covert negation. The former subtype relates to instances in which covert negation is derived from the lexical meaning of the particular lexeme and is not influenced by the communicative situation. Such lexemes are usually intensifiers and superlatives conveying the idea of totality or lack of exception. The latter subtype includes contexts in which covert negation is linked to the particular communicative situation in which the speaker is engaged. In these cases, ‘negative’ gestures may be involved in self-repairs, in indicating disagreement, in conveying a lesser degree of commitment toward the speaker's message, and in providing negative evaluation of the conveyed content. These recent findings originating in the study of gesture broaden the scope of negation from the mere presence of negative particles and the occurrence in a specific syntactic environment (Ayer, 1952) to an underlying cognitive domain that, in some contexts, may have only a gestural manifestation. These findings resonate with cognitive approaches to negation, such as the one developed by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996). Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk argued that the identity of negation does not depend solely on the overtly expressed negative words, and the negative identity of some linguistic units may be covert. In the present paper, we aim to contribute to this growing body of research by examining the various categories of covert negation in Israeli Hebrew, which can be uncovered by gestures. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 will present the corpus and methodology utilized in this study. Sections 3e7 will present the typology of verbal utterances that do not contain markers of grammatical negation and that may be accompanied by gestures associated with grammatical negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew. Moreover, we will try to explain why these patterns occur in the revealed contexts. Section 8 will provide a discussion of the data, followed by a short summary (Section 9).
2. Corpus and methodology In Israeli Hebrew, grammatical negation may be expressed on morphosyntactical, derivational, or lexical levels. Morphosyntactical negation is expressed by linguistic elements that negate a clause or one of its constituents. The particle lo serves as the main marker of negation and may be used in most grammatical contexts, negating verbal forms other than imperatives, as well as all kinds of non-verbal forms; the particle al is used to negate imperative verbs, conveying prohibition; the particle ejn is used in existential/possessive constructions. Derivational negation is expressed by prefixes that may be deployed in creating new negative lexemes, the main affixes being bilti-, i-, and a-, roughly comparable to the English prefixes dis-, in-, non-, and un-. Lexical negation includes the negative indefinites, the main forms being ʃum ‘no’/’any’, ʃum davar/klum‘no/any-thing’, af ecad ‘no/any-one’, and af paam ‘no time/n(ot)ever’ (Shor, forthcoming). Inbar and Shor (2017) identified recurrent gestural patterns that co-occur with grammatical negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and accounted for their forms and functions in terms of their conceptual foundations in primary metaphoric, spacemotion schematic, and force dynamic reasoning. It was shown that each of the three types of grammatical negation (morphosyntactical, derivational, and lexical) may be accompanied by any gesture from the following set of patterns: headshakes, ‘sweeping away’ gestures, ‘holding away’ gestures, ‘hands up’ gestures, ‘finger-wagging’ gestures, shoulder shrugs. However, the distribution of these gestural patterns may be explained in either cognitive or communicative terms (Inbar and Shor, 2017). The revealed gestural patterns are schematically illustrated in Fig. 1 below:
2 A concise literature review on various types of open hand gestures can be found in Bressem et al. (2017: 177). For more information on the cultural distribution of the headshake, as well as on its formal and functional variation, see Harrison (2014b). 3 The Open Hand Prone family includes gestures in which the hand is held with all digits extended and the forearm is in a prone position so that the palm of the hand faces either toward the ground or away from the speaker (Kendon, 2004: 248).
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Fig. 1. Overview of ‘negative’ gestures in Israeli Hebrew.4
Based on the typology of the revealed gestural patterns associated with grammatical negation in Israeli Hebrew, in the current study, we identified contexts that did not contain markers of grammatical negation in which these gestural patterns appeared. Since all gestural patterns were found to some extent occur in each context, in this paper we will not discuss their functional distribution in the revealed contexts. The present study is based on a 20-h corpus of TV interviews in Hebrew recorded between 2009 and 2017 with over 50 speakers. The interviews were selected from the TV programs Cross Israel, Room 101, and Soul Talk. The first one deals with Israeli society and with the processes that shape it in a variety of areas of life: science, culture, economics, and politics. The second one is a comedy television series with Israeli celebrities. The third one is formatted as a therapy session conducted by a well-known Israeli psychoanalyst who interviews prominent characters in Israeli society about their personal and professional lives. The age of the speakers in these programs is over 20. The programs document speakers filmed from the waist up. When examining the methodology applied in both studies e the current study and the previous one (Inbar and Shor, 2017) e a few additional remarks should be made. First, it should be noted that different patterns may be produced simultaneously, a common combination, for example, being a headshake with a ‘sweeping away’ gesture. Second, since the speakers were filmed seated, the pattern of going backward was not considered. Neither did we take into account facial expressions, since they were not always captured clearly. These two patterns d moving backward and specific facial expressions d may also convey the meaning of negation in Israeli Hebrew. Third, different performances of the revealed patterns d one-handed or two-handed, as well as single gesture or several repetitions of the chosen pattern d were considered as variations within the pattern that may reflect various degrees of intensity (Inbar and Shor, 2017). Finally, temporal synchrony between the gestural negation and verbal negation was somewhat variable d the onset of the ‘negative’ gesture was very often synchronized with the verbal negator, yet in some cases, the ‘negative’ gesture preceded or followed the verbal negator. In what follows, we will present the typology of the contexts that did not contain markers of grammatical negation in which the gestural patterns typically associated with grammatical negation appeared. Moreover, we will attempt to motivate the occurrence of these gestures within such contexts, proposing a semantic account.5
4 5
It should be noted that ‘sweeping away’ and ‘holding away’ are terms adopted from Bressem and Müller 2014. The tendency of particular gestural patterns to appear in particular contexts awaits future research.
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3. Words with negative meaning component The revealed gestural patterns were found to be coordinated with words such as kaʃe ‘difficult’, mesubac ‘complicated’, neelam ‘disappeared’, lehafsik ‘to stop’, met ‘die’, ibdu ‘lost’, lefarek ‘to take apart’, fisfast ‘missed’. Examples 1 and 2 illustrate some of these occurrences6 (1)
laasot sratim/ to.do movies/ ‘Stop making movies?’
(2)
o ha¼toʦaa ʃel¼ha¼predot haele hu or DEF¼result of¼DEF¼break.ups these he ‘The effect or the result of these breakups is hard, is not good.’
ha¼cotam
DEF¼effect
j hu lo j he NEG
tov j good j
The utterance in (1) is produced by the interviewer who wonders whether the interviewee decided to stop making movies after one of his movies failed at the box office. Uttering lehafsik ‘to stop’, the interviewer moves his left hand from the center of his body to the periphery and produces a single lateral headshake (Patterns 1 and 2). In (2), the interviewer describes how the human brain reacts to breakup, and co-expressively with the word kaʃe ‘hard’, moves his left finger from side to side (Pattern 5), while producing multiple lateral headshakes (Pattern 1). Once he ceases to move his finger and shake his head, he produces the verbal negative phrase lo tov ‘not good’, which can be seen as retrospectively clarifying the covertly negative lexeme kaʃe ‘hard’. n (2001: 395) The connection between particular lexemes and negation has been discussed in linguistic literature. Givo refers to the phenomenon in terms of ‘inherent/lexical negation,’ and suggests that particular words, such as inherently negative modality verbs (‘lack’, ‘refuse’, ‘avoid’, and the like) have negative inference. Sovran (2014: Ch. 5) postulates that such lexemes share a Neg-element as a component of their lexical meaning, and that this element has a special status in the actual and mental lexicon. Sovran identifies four subdomains of Neg-element in the lexicon: the somatic-experiential (such as pain, fear, sorrow), interactional-social (such as rape, crime, violence), culture-dependent (such as hell, devil, doomsday), and prelogical (such as absence, missing, deviation). Co-occurrence of such lexemes with gestures that are usually coordinated with grammatical negation contributes to both hypotheses. We suggest that ‘negative gestures’ coordinated with such lexemes make this component of meaning visible and, consequently, accentuated. 4. Intensification ‘Negative gestures’ were found to appear in contexts of intensification, typically co-occurring with amplifiers, universal quantifiers, and intensifying adjectives. Amplifiers are words that indicate a high degree, or the highest degree, of some relevant scale. In our corpus, the amplifiers that co-occurred with negative gestures included the following: meod ‘very’, haci ‘the most’, harbe ‘a lot’, hamon ‘plenty’, bejoter ‘highly’, cadmaʃmait ‘unequivocally’, legamrej ‘totally’, lacalutin ‘completely’, bevadaj ‘definitely’, and beheclet ‘certainly’. Universal quantifiers such as hakol ‘everything’, kol ‘every, all’, or kulam ‘everyone’, contribute to intensification by implying that there are no exceptions. Intensifying adjectives such as madhima ‘astonishing’, nifla ‘wonderful’, or nehederet ‘amazing’ can be seen as containing an intensity component as part of their meaning. These uses are demonstrated in the following examples:
(3)
I-er
zot ʃeela caʃuva le¼historjon/ this question important to¼historian/ ‘Is that an important question for an historian?’ ladaat haim anaʃim to.know Q people ‘To know whether people are happy?’
I-ee
meuʃarim/ happy/
haci li ke¼historjon
caʃuva> j important> j
6 Transcription is usually broad phonetic. Glossing follows, mutatis mutandis, the Leipzig Glossing Rules. Notation: j minor prosodic boundary; jj major prosodic boundary;/major prosodic boundary carrying an ‘appeal’ tone; - truncated word; (0.5) pause measured in seconds; . Speakers are referred to as I-ee (Interviewee) and I-er (Interviewer).
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(5)
I-er
ec margiʃa horut how feel parenthood ‘How does late parenthood feel?’
I-ee
j j ‘Wonderful.’
I-ee
kol ma ʃe all what that ‘All I want to say is that her closet’
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meuceret/ late/
rotsa want
lehagid j to.say j
ʃe that
ben ʃnot takua ej.ʃam stuck somewhere between years ‘Is stuck somewhere between the 1990s to the 2000s.’
ha¼tiʃim DEF¼ninety
le¼ʃnot to¼years
ha¼alpaim jj DEF¼two.thousand jj
acʃav boj now come ‘Now, let me say that … ’
et¼ze ACC¼this -
ani I
ani I
agid I.will.tell
I-er
ʃe hi lo klomar it.means that she NEG she.updated/ ‘You mean, she did not update herself?’
I-ee
ʃe that
ha¼aron DEF¼closet
ʃela her
hitadkena/
ratsiti I.wanted
lehagid> jj to.say> jj
In (3), the interviewee, who is a historian, was asked a yeseno question regarding the significance of knowing whether people in a certain period were happy or not. He provides a positive response which is verbally intensified by means of the amplifier haci ‘the most’, and gesturally by moving the right hand from the center of his body to the periphery (Pattern 2), along with multiple lateral headshakes (Pattern 1). These gestures are co-expressive with the entire sentence zot ha¼ʃeela haci caʃuva ‘that is the most important question’. In (4), the interviewee uses the intensifying adjective nifla ‘wonderful’ as an answer to a content question, and accompanies it with a lateral headshake (Pattern 1). In (5), the interviewee discusses the fashion sense of a famous person. The interviewee's words imply that her clothes are ugly. She does not want to offend her, though, and says that her clothes are out of style. The interviewee adds ‘That's all I wanted to say’ in order to make it clear that nothing else should be inferred from the previous discourse, namely ‘her closet is stuck somewhere between the 1990s to the 2000s.’ The statement is conveyed in an intensified manner, which is created verbally by employing the universal quantifier kol ‘all’, and gesturally by raising both hands up (Pattern 4). Examples 3e5 suggest that domains of intensification and negation have some kind of conceptual affinity. This affinity can be motivated from different directions. From a semantic perspective, intensification can be taken as conveying a very high degree (if not the highest) of some relevant scale. At the same time, this degree can be construed as the denial of the rest of the scale, or of other relevant alternatives (cf. Kendon, 2004: 255e258). Thus, while the interviewee in (3) considers the question of happiness the most important one for a historian, he implicitly rejects any other relevant questions that can be regarded as important. By the same token, when the speaker in (4) evaluates late parenthood as being wonderful, she implicitly rejects any other possible evaluations that are weaker than the one she proposed. In (5), the quantifier kol ‘all’ modifies the previous discourse as an entire message, and that nothing else should be inferred but what was explicitly said. We suggest that such implicit rejection of weaker alternatives becomes visible by the accompanying ‘negative gestures.’ From an interactional perspective, intensification often serves as an argumentative resource for persuading the recipient, in the wake of possible objection on his part. From this vantage point, ‘negative gestures’ co-occurring with intensified statements can be interpreted as rejection of actual or implied objections to that statement (cf. Calbris, 2011: 174). Thus, the ‘negative gestures’ in (3) can be seen as rejecting the common view, underlying the interviewer's question, according to which historians are only interested in objective facts from the past, and not in people's feelings. Similarly, lateral headshake in (4) can be interpreted as rejection of possible objections to the speaker's claim. The ‘hands up’ gesture in (5) can be seen as protecting the speaker against an unwanted interpretation of her words. It is worth noting that a negation marker itself might be an intensifier, highlighting the information within its scope. This is the case with the utterances that contain a so-called ‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’ negation that occurs in ‘WHword þ that þ not’ constructions in Israeli Hebrew. Such constructions convey a meaning of positive intensification, despite the presence of a negative marker (Giora, 2006: 992e993; Shefer, 2017). Consider example (6): (6)
j j ‘Wherever they came from.’ (lit. ‘From where they did not come from’) ha¼olam ha¼ʃnija milcemet world DEF¼world DEF¼second ‘The Second World War was there.’
hajta she.was
ʃam j there j
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In (6), using a ‘WH-word þ that þ not’ construction, the speaker describes World War II survivors as being traumatized no matter where they came from, or each and every place they came from. Thus, the utterance ‘wherever they did not come from’ has emphatic positive interpretation despite the presence of a negative marker lo ‘not’. The negation in example (6) is coordinated with the headshake (Pattern 1) and the ‘sweeping away’ gesture (Pattern 2). We suggest that both gestures relate to the emphatic interpretation that this construction has in Hebrew. In this case, the ‘negative gestures’ intensify the implication arising from the utterance, namely, that there are no exceptions. 5. Indefinite modifiers ‘Negative gestures’ occasionally co-occur with indefinite modifiers and hedging expressions, such as ejze ‘some’, ejzeʃehu ‘some.SGM’, or ejzeʃehi ‘some.SGF’. In (7), the speaker uses a hedged expression ‘some play’ and accompanies it with a headshake:
(7)
ve hi nora raʦta <ʃe and she awful she.wanted
ani I
eʃlac I.will.send to.her
la some
ejzeʃehu macaze> j play> j
In (7), the interviewee describes how his daughter asked him to send her a play and accompanies this utterance with a headshake. The gesture seems to reflect the implication arising from the hedging, namely that he does not remember what kind of play it was exactly, and perhaps that the name of the play is not significant for his current purpose (cf. Grishina, 2015: 586). Thus, the use of the gesture may be seen as a refusal to commit to something. 6. Discourse particles The same gestural patterns were found to accompany discourse particles that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. One group of particles involves the so-called ‘restrictive’ or ‘exclusive’ particles, whose function is to focus on a particular entity, aspect, or interpretation of a situation, excluding other potential candidates and choices (Xiang, 2011: 1378e1380). The restrictive particles rak ‘only’, paʃut ‘just’, and zehu ‘that's it’ are only few examples that Israeli Hebrew has in its arsenal. The use of the particle rak ‘only’ is shown in (8) and (9): (8)
jeʃ
elohim j ve jeʃ kod god j and EXT code ‘There is only God, and there is a specific code,’ EXT
mesujam j specific j
ʦaric lehitlabeʃ j asur laʃevet lejad kaca thus should to.dress j forbidden to.sit near ‘That is how you should dress; it is forbidden to sit near boys.’
(9)
ha¼cadaʃ hu DEF¼new he ‘The new God is a loving god.’
ha¼elohim DEF¼god
zot this.SGF ‘This is only love.’
elohim god
banim j boys j
ohev j loving j
ahava j love j
The examples (8) and (9) were extracted from the same conversation in which the interviewee described how, after being raised in a strictly religious community, she realized that the things she had been told were not necessarily true. It was such a discovery that led her to find her own way of believing in God. In (8), the speaker presents a series of axioms she was told while growing up, the first of which is that ‘There is only God.’ This utterance invokes the interpretation ‘There is only God, and nothing else,’ which is emphasized by multiple lateral headshakes. Shory after the excerpt presented in (8), the same speaker produces the utterance in (9), in which she says that in contrast to the image of a god that dominated her religious upbringing, one that rewards the good and punishes the bad, she now chooses to believe in a ‘loving god’. The loving character of her newfound god is further highlighted by means of the restrictive utterance zot ahava ‘This is only love,’ accompanied by multiple lateral headshakes which, similarly to (8), make the restrictive interpretation of ‘and nothing else’ visible and emphasized. Another particle that has a restrictive meaning in Israeli Hebrew is the discourse marker paʃut, which is equivalent to the English just. Similarly to just (Aijmer, 2002: 158; Molina and Romano, 2011: 19), paʃut has the basic function of instructing the recipient to restrict the range of possible inferences derivable from the speaker's utterance, as well as to restrict the range of possible interpretations of a situation in which the utterance was expressed (Ziv, 2001). This restrictive meaning becomes visible through a co-expressive gesture, as demonstrated in example (10):
A. Inbar, L. Shor / Journal of Pragmatics 143 (2019) 85e95 (10)
I-er
ve az be gil acatesre matcil ha¼mered and then in age eleven start DEF¼rebellion ‘And then at the age of eleven begins your rebellion against religion.’
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ʃelac your
neged against
ha¼dat jj DEF¼religion jj
j kirjat arba hu makom j Kiryat Arba he place ‘It is just that Kiryat Arba is a very specific place, it is small.’
meod very
speʦifi specific
j hu katan j j he small j
ve hu j lefacot az em j and he j at.least then uhm j ‘And it is, at least then, surrounded by barriers (lit. fences).’
mukaf surrounded
be¼gderot j in¼fences j
ma kara/ what happened/ ‘What happened?’ I-ee
After being asked by the interviewer about the circumstances that made her rebel against religion at the age of eleven, the interviewee explains that it was the contrast she saw when she moved from a small and conservative town to a bigger city. She begins her explanation with the discourse marker paʃut ‘just’, and accompanies it with a lateral headshake. We suggest that in this case, the headshake visualizes restriction, which is part of the procedural meaning of the discourse marker paʃut, and together they signal that the interviewer should ignore any other assumptions he might have had regarding why she rebelled, in favor of her specific explanation. The discourse particle zehu ‘that's it’ has various functions in Israeli Hebrew, one of which is related to the meaning of restriction (Bardenstein et al., in press; Shor and Inbar, 2019). The restrictive zehu is occasionally accompanied by ‘negative gestures.’ Such an instance is shown in (11), in which the interviewee describes the scarcity of her meetings with her father, after her parents got divorced: (11)
ani zoceret ʃe kʃe I remember that when ‘I remember that when I was younger in Kiryat Arba’
joter more
ktana little
be¼kirjat arba in¼Kiryat Arba
az raiti oto harbe ki so I.saw him many because ‘I saw him (¼the speaker's father) a lot because he was living there,’
hu he
gar lived
ʃam j there j
ve j kʃe hajiti bat j kʃe avarnu and j when I.was old j when we.moved ‘And, when I was, when we moved to Netanya, I visited him once.’
le¼netanja to¼Netanya
az so
nasati I.rode
hu kvar avar he already moved ‘He already moved to Gedera,’
le¼gedera j to¼Gedera j
em j ve uhm j and ‘Uhm, , and that's it, ’
zehu j this.he j
vj ejze ʃnej and j approximately two and approximately two family events.’
j eruim j events
hajiti I.was
elav to.him
paam j once j
miʃpactijim j family.related j
In (11), the interviewee describes how the frequency of her meetings with her father decreased after she and her family had moved to another city. After saying that during that period she only met her father once, the interviewee produces multiple lateral headshakes, followed by the marker zehu ‘that's it’, and then mentions two additional occasions. The lateral headshake in this context seems to anticipate the subsequent zehu, which has a restrictive interpretation, according to which only the meeting she mentioned had taken place, and not others. This interpretation is made visible by the headshake. Another example is the adverbial bixlal ‘at all, generally, especially’, which is strongly associated with negation, functioning as a discourse particle. This particle is often used as a negative polarity item that reinforces negation (Tsirkin-Sadan and Avigail, 2015). Such use is illustrated in (12): (12)
im paam hajiti gitarist j az ani lo if once I.was guitarist j so I NEG ‘Once I was a guitar player, so today I don't play at all.’
menagen play
hajom today
j j
Prior to the example, the interviewee described himself as a person who does not like doing things he is not absolutely good at. Here, he exemplifies his claim by contrasting his past as a guitarist to his present, where he does not play the guitar at all. The discourse particle bixlal is accompanied by a single side-to-side movement of the raised left index finger (Pattern 5). Here, bixlal intensifies the grammatical negation expressed by lo ‘not’, thus emphasizing that there are no exceptions, and today the speaker does not play guitar on any occasion.
92 (13)
A. Inbar, L. Shor / Journal of Pragmatics 143 (2019) 85e95 ze haja raaʃ this it.was noise ‘It was a terrible noise for them’
norai awful
mibcinatam j for.them j
hahem j ba¼ʃanim in.DEF¼years those j ‘In those years especially.’
In (13), the interviewee, who is an Israeli rock singer, tells how his musical career began in the late 1970s: After stating that his music was once regarded as an awful noise, the interviewee adds a reference to the period he is talking about (the late 1970s) and modifies it with biclal ‘especially’, marking this period, and not others, as especially relevant. This addition intensifies his prior statement, since it construes his music as especially noisy d not only because rock music objectively tends to be loud, but also due to the specific period of time in which his music began to be heard. 7. Conversational implicatures In some instances, the discussed gestural patterns seem to be related to the conversational implicature arising from the verbal utterance. In these cases, the gesture conveys a separate message from that of the propositional content of the utterance. Example (14) demonstrates an instance in which an answer to an alternative question implies the rejection of one of the alternatives: (14)
I-er
basof hi j raʦta lamut j o in.the.end she j she.wanted to.die j or ‘In the end, did she want to die or did she still want to live?’
ʃe that
I-ee
ha¼acaron> jj DEF¼last> jj
ha¼rega DEF¼moment
hi she
od still
raʦta she.wanted
licjot/ to.live/
In (14), the interviewer mentions the final days of the interviewee's mother who had been battling cancer, and asks whether she still wanted to live at that point or preferred to die. The interviewee opts for the latter alternative, answering that her mother very much wanted to live, and accompanies her response with multiple lateral headshakes which denies the former one. Example (15) demonstrates an instance of a rhetorical yeseno question that implies a reversed state of affairs (Han, 2002: 202): (15)
haja rega ʃe at amart was moment that you you.told ‘Was there a moment when you said to yourself’
biclal at.all
ma ze
ʦrica need
le¼aʦmec j to¼yourself j
et¼ze>/ ACC¼this>/
tov>/ good>/
Prior to (15), the interviewer mentioned the difficult time the interviewee experienced during one of the political events she covered as a news anchor. In (15), the interviewer asks whether there was a moment when she asked herself the questions, ‘Do I really need it?’ and ‘What is it good for?’ In this context, the questions may be interpreted as ‘I don't really need it’ and ‘It is good for nothing.’ These implied negative assertions are visualized by a series of lateral headshakes produced by the speaker. Example (16) shows an information-seeking question that implies the questioner's lack of knowledge: (16)
I-ee
ve acʃav ani ovedet al¼sefer and now I work on¼book ‘And now I am working on another book,’
acer j other j
ʃe ulaj korim lo ʃem zmani that maybe call to.him name tentative ‘which will have the tentative title “An autobiography of a door.”’ I-er
/ / ‘Why a door?’
otobiografja autobiography
ʃel¼delet jj of¼door jj
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After the interviewee talks about the new title of her upcoming book, the interviewer wonders why she chose that specific name. He accompanies his question with a lateral headshake. In this case, the gestures seem to reflect the presupposition underlying information-seeking questions, namely that the person asking the question does not know the answer. 8. Discussion In the previous sections (3e7), we have shown that a particular set of gestural patterns that had originally been identified by their co-occurrence with grammatical negation d headshakes, ‘sweeping away’ gestures, ‘holding away’ gestures, ‘hands up’ gestures, ‘finger-wagging’ gestures, and shrugs d may also accompany utterances that do not contain any grammatical markers of negation. However, all the contexts revealed are connected to negation on some cognitive level. When these gestures associated with words like absence, bad and the like, they emphasize the neg-element which is a component of their meaning. Using amplifiers, such as absolutely, totally, etc., can be taken as conveying a very high degree on some relevant scale that is construed as the denial of the rest of the scale or of other relevant alternatives (cf. Kendon, 2004: 255e258; Calbris, 2011: 174; Harrison, 2018: 133, 140). Universal quantifiers and so-called redundant negation may indicate rejection of any exception (cf. Calbris, 2011: 35; Harrison, 2018: 111). Intensifying adjectives such as amazing, astonishing etc., may indicate rejection of lower degrees on a relevant scale. Indefinite modifiers imply refusal to commit to the truthfulness or the exactness of the provided information (cf. Grishina, 2015: 586). The gestures associated with grammatical negation may also be coordinated with the specific discourse particles that imply negation or restriction as a part of their procedural meaning. Finally, negative meaning can be reconstructed as a conversational implicature, separately from that of the propositional content of the utterance. The occurrence of the same gestural patterns in all these contexts unifies them, and suggests that all of them share a meaning that is associated with grammatical negation. Taking a cognitive semantic perspective to negation, we argue that the occurrence of the gestures in the contexts described above suggests that these gestures indicate a higher abstract notion, namely ‘negativity’ rather than negation. The manifestation of ‘negativity’ in the lexicon was recently described by Sovran (2014: Ch.5), who concluded that ‘negativity’ is not a semantic field or a semantic frame, but rather a cross-domain conceptual element that originates in various levels of human needs and preferences. ‘Negativity’ is most clearly reflected in words associated with physical aversion and negative emotional feelings, such as pain and fear, where it is rooted in the somatic and psychic experience of each individual. The status of ‘negativity’ in words, such as violence and crime, is rooted not only in negative feelings of discomfort or threat, but also in the social or interactive domain, reflected in the fact that such words typically presuppose the existence of an aggressor and a victim. ‘Negativity’ is even less apparent in words, such as devil and hell, since the association of these words with negativity is gradually built through beliefs, mythologies, and worldviews. Finally, ‘negativity’ in words, such as absence and denial, is rooted in the human preference for existence, completeness, and functioning, and thus in these words ‘negativity’ is the opposite of the existing, the complete, and the functioning. Sovran's discussion of the concept of ‘negativity’ relies on the cognitive approach to negation, initiated by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996), which explores deeper levels than syntax and morphology to ‘cover the negation incorporated in words, discourse or knowledge frames.’ On this account, through the use of the particular gestures coordinated not only with overt or grammatical negation but also with covert negation, the notion of ‘negativity’ can manifest itself. Moreover, the gestures discussed in this paper indicate the notion of ‘negativity’ that resides not only on the lexical level, but also on syntactic and pragmatic levels, while the underlying meaning of ‘negativity’ becomes visible and potentially emphasized. Furthermore, it is worth noting that particular expressions that do not include any markers of negation may express negation or negativity on different stages of grammaticalization processes in which they are involved. For example, it has been shown that diachronically, inherently negative verbs, such as ‘fail’, ‘lack’, ‘refuse’, ‘decline’, or ‘avoid’, may give rise to negation-marking morphemes. In the process of grammaticalization, the verbs' specific semantic features are bleached out, n, 2001: 382e383). leaving only their negative inference (Heine and Kuteva, 2002: 188; Givo The connection between intensification and negation is also evident in language itself and may be manifested by semantic change. It has been shown that lexemes that originally convey strong negative meanings over time may develop intensified positive meanings or be used as intensifiers. Israeli Hebrew provides several examples of such development. The original meaning of the lexeme nora represented in Hebrew's earlier strata is ‘terrible, frightening’. This meaning contains a Negelement, which became dominant through the process of grammaticalization, and the word was used as a negative description, for example in mezeg avir nora ‘terrible weather’. Later, another process takes place in which the element of meaning connected with extremity or exaggeration is preserved, while the negative element is eroded. Thus, the lexeme nora, has come to be used in Israeli Hebrew as a general intensifier denoting ‘really, very’ that can be used in negative and positive contexts, for example nora jafe ‘very beautiful’. Similarly, the phrase caval al hazman, originally conveying negative meaning, namely ‘waste of time’, can be used as a general intensifier. This pattern of semantic change is not limited to the phrase level but can also be observed in the constructional level. For instance, a common way to express intensification in the domain of love/desire/adoration in Israeli Hebrew is by using the idiomatic construction [X PRD al Y] [‘X PRD on Y’], which employs negatively connotated predicates that are not obviously related to LOVE/DESIRE/ADORATION, but rather originate from the conceptual domains of DEATH (e.g., met ‘die’), ILLNESS (e.g., cole ‘sick/ ill’), INSANITY (e.g., meʃuga ‘crazy’), and ANNIHILATION (harus ‘devastated’) (Vardi, 2015). Vardi (2015: 45e46) suggests that these domains share similar elements of meaning such as passiveness, dysfunction, and totality d elements that are also associated
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with intense love. On the basis of their shared metonymies, metaphorical uses of ‘die’, ‘ill’, ‘insane’, and ‘devastated’ can express intensified ‘love/desire/adoration’. Furthermore, Vardi (2015: 46) mentions that employment of negatively connotated concepts for the purpose of negative as well as positive intensification can also be motivated by a cognitive-affective pattern, according to which negative experience (particularly related negative feelings and emotions) holds greater weight than positive emotions. As a result, negative experience has greater influence on behavior than positive experience does. We can see that the domains of negation and intensification intersect in the seemingly paradoxical uses of negative response particles in several languages as affirmative intensifiers, particularly in contexts of heightened emotion (e.g., Grishina, 2011; Shor, forthcoming). Negative particles can be used as ‘negative exclamatives’ conveying intensified positive evaluations and expressing the speaker's surprise or astonishment (Delfitto and Fiorin, 2014). A typical example of such use in Hebrew is the following sentence that was uttered by a Facebook user as a response to a picture uploaded by her friend: (17)
at mehamemet be¼ramot acerot. you astonishing in¼other levels. ‘No, you are totally astonishing.’
lo
NEG
One possible explanation would be to hypothesize that, on some cognitive level, speakers use standalone negators in order to reject potential and anticipated objections on the part of the recipient, ones that may weaken the speaker's overall position. As a result, the speakers' claims and descriptions are validated and intensified. Thus, the connection of ‘negativity’ with morphosyntactic negation as well as with other, non-negative domains may be evident from various linguistic data in different modalities. Such connections are further verified and expanded by gestural evidence presented in this paper. 9. Summary This article described various types of morpho-syntactically positive utterances that are often accompanied by a particular set of gestural patterns previously identified as associated with morpho-syntactically negative utterances in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of various types of morpho-syntactically positive utterances accompanied by ‘negative’ gestures revealed that all the contexts were connected to negation on some cognitive level. This led us to suggest that this set of gestural patterns indicate a higher abstract notion, namely ‘negativity’ rather than negation. ‘Negativity’ then can be manifested in diverse types of positive phrases and utterances d words with inherent negation, structures conveying intensification, discourse particles, indefinite modifiers, and as conversational implicatures. Morpho-syntactic negation, therefore, should be considered as only one possible expression of negativity. Moreover, it was shown that an inquiry of the interface between gestural and verbal modalities in one particular domain d in our case the domain of negation/negativity d can illuminate various expressions of that domain in the verbal modality. The association of gestures indicating ‘negativity’ with all kinds of contexts revealed in this study makes the connection between them visible. Furthermore, we showed that various linguistic expressions of that domain may be connected in verbal modality as well by various processes of grammaticalization. Finally, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments (De Ruiter, 2000; Kirchhof, 2011). Acknowledgements The previous versions of this paper were presented at The 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 10, 2017, and at The 8th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies e Gesture and Diversity, Cape Town, South Africa, on July 7, 2018. We are grateful to several participants of those conferences for their helpful comments. We would like to thank two anonymous referees for Journal of Pragmatics for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. All errors and infelicities that remain are our sole responsibility. We would like to thank Eyal Cremer for providing the drawings. References Aijmer, Karin, 2002. English discourse particles. Evidence from a corpus. Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 10. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Antas, Jolanta, Gembalczyk, Sonia, 2017. The bodily expression of negation in Polish. J. Multimodal Commun. Stud. 4 (1e2), 16e22. Ayer, Alfred Jules, 1952. Negation. J. Philos. 49, 797e815. Bardenstein, Ruthi, Shor, Leon, Inbar, Anna, 2019. Zehu ‘that's it’ as a Discourse Marker in Spoken Israeli Hebrew. Hebrew Linguistics [Balshanut 'ivrit]. [In Hebrew] in press. Bressem, Jana, Müller, Cornelia, 2014. The family of away-gestures: negation, refusal, and negative assessment. In: Müller, Cornelia, Cienki, Alan, Fricke, Ellen, Ladewig, Silva H., McNeill, David, Jana, Bressem (Eds.), BodydLanguagedCommunication: an International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction [Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.2]. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, pp. 1592e1604. Bressem, Jana, Stein, Nicole, Wegener, Claudia, 2017. Multimodal language use in Savosavo: refusing, excluding and negating with speech and gesture. Pragmatics 27 (2), 173e206. ve, 2011. Elements of Meaning in Gesture. John Benjamins, Philadelphia, PA. Calbris, Genevie Crystal, David, 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackwell, Oxford. € Dahl, Osten, 2010. Typology of negation. In: Horn, Laurence R. (Ed.), The Expression of Negation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 9e38.
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De Ruiter, Jan Peter, 2000. The production of gesture and speech. In: McNeill, David (Ed.), Language and Gesture. CUP, Cambridge, pp. 284e311. Delfitto, Denis, Fiorin, Gaetano, 2014. Negation in exclamatives. Stud. Ling. 68 (3), 284e327. Giora, Rachel, 2006. Anything negatives can do affirmatives can do just as well, except for some metaphors. J. Pragmat. 38, 981e1014. n, Talmy, 1978. Negation in language: pragmatics, function, ontology. In: Cole, Peter (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. Academic Press, New Givo York, pp. 69e112. n, Talmy, 2001. Syntax, vol. I. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Givo Grishina, Elena, 2011. Дa ‘Yes’ in dialogue in spoken Russian. Russ. Ling. 35 (2), 169e207. Grishina, Elena, 2015. Russian gestures of negation [O russkom zhestikulyatsionnom otritsanii]. Proc. Inst. Russ. Lang. 6, 556e604. Han, Chung-hye, 2002. Interpreting interrogatives as rhetorical questions. Lingua 112, 201e229. Harrison, Simon, 2014a. The organisation of kinesic ensembles associated with negation. Gesture 14 (2), 117e141. Harrison, Simon, 2014b. Head shakes: variation in form, function, and cultural distribution of a head movement related to “no”. In: Müller, Cornelia, Cienki, Alan, Fricke, Ellen, Ladewig, Silva H., McNeill, David, Jana, Bressem (Eds.), BodydLanguagedCommunication: an International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction [Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.2]. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, pp. 1496e1501. Harrison, Simon, 2018. The Impulse to Gesture: where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. e, Pierre, 2015. Morphosyntactic correlates of gestures: a gesture associated with negation in French and its organisation with Harrison, Simon, Larrive e, Pierre, Lee, Chungmin (Eds.), Negation and Polarity. Experimental Perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 75e94. speech. In: Larrive Haspelmath, Martin, 2013. Negative indefinite pronouns and predicate negation. In: Dryer, Matthew S., Haspelmath, Martin (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at: http://wals.info/chapter/115. (Accessed 11 January 2017). Heine, Bernd, Kuteva, Tania, 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Horn, Laurence R. (Ed.), 2010a. The Expression of Negation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Horn, Laurence R., 2010b. Introduction. In: Horn, Laurence R. (Ed.), The Expression of Negation. Inbar, Anna, 2014. Toward A Logic of Gestures. MA Dissertation. Tel Aviv University [In Hebrew]. Inbar, Anna, Shor, Leon, 2017. Negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew: the interplay between grammar and gestures. In: 44th Annual Meeting of the Israeli Association of Applied Linguistics. Achva Academic College, Israel [In Hebrew]. Kendon, Adam, 2004. Gestures: Visible Actions as Utterance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kirchhof, Carolin, 2011. So what's your affiliation with gesture?. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn 2011). Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, 1996. Depth of Negation: A Cognitive Study. Lodz University Press. Miestamo, Matti, 2007. Negation d an overview of typological research. Lang. Linguist. Compass 1 (5), 552e570. Molina, Clara, Romano, Manuela, 2011. JUST revisited: panchronic and contrastive insights. Int. J. Engl. Stud. 12, 17e36. Serratrice, Ludovica, Allen, Shanley EM. (Eds.), 2015. The Acquisition of Reference, vol. 15. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam. Shefer, Hagit, 2017. A construction grammar perspective on negation in Hebrew. Hebrew Stud. 58, 297e313. Shor, Leon, forthcoming. Negation in Israeli Hebrew. In: Bracha Nir, Ruth Berman (Eds), Usage Based Studies in Modern Hebrew. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shor, Leon, Inbar, Anna, 2019. The meaning of zehu in spoken Israeli Hebrew: a corpus-based analysis of its interjectional function. In: The Social Life of Interjections [Scandinavian Language Studies], 10, pp. 131e151. Sovran, Tamar, 2014. Relational Semantics and the Anatomy of Abstraction. Routledge, New York. Tsirkin-Sadan, Avigail, 2015. Inheritance and Slavic contact in the polysemy of bixlal. In: Doron, Edit (Ed.), Language Contact and the Development of Modern Hebrew. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 84, pp. 215e227. Vardi, Ruti, 2015. ‘I'm dying on you’ constructions of intensification in Hebrew expression of love/desire/adoration. Rev. Cognit. Linguist. 13 (1), 28e58. h in Xiang, Xuehua, 2011. Constraint reality: linguistic expressions of restrictivity and emotive stances. A discourse-pragmatic study of utterance-final la Shishan. Lingua 121, 1377e1400. Ziv, Yael, 2001. It's not at all pashut (‘simple’): the discourse markers of colloquial Hebrew. Hebrew Linguist. [Balshanut 'ivrit] 48, 17e29 [In Hebrew]. Anna Inbar is a lecturer in Levinsky College of Education and Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, Israel. Her main research is in the area of pragmatics and gesture studies, with an emphasis on expression of abstract notions in gestures and their conceptualization. Her current focus is on the use of different grammatical devices reflecting cognitive processes occurring in the mind of the speakers, and how the speakers manipulate grammar to construct reality differently according to their communicative purposes. Leon Shor is a lecturer in Achva Academic College and Kaye Academic College of Education, Israel. His research interests lie in the syntax and pragmatics of conversational language, making use of discourse-functional approaches to the study of spoken language, as well as of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. His current research focuses on expression of negation, referential discourse markers, and grammaticalization.
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Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures Anna Inbar a, *, 1, Leon Shor b, 1 a b
Tel Aviv University, Amnon VeTamar 10/3, Shoshanat HaAmaqim, 4298400, Israel Tel Aviv University, HaMatmid 30/4, Ramat Gan, 5250148, Israel
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Received 10 December 2018 Received in revised form 19 February 2019 Accepted 19 February 2019
The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion d namely, ‘negativity’ d rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Negation is commonly defined as a process or construction in grammatical and semantic analysis that typically expresses the contradiction of some or all of a sentence's meaning (Crystal, 2008: 323). Every human language seems to have some morphosyntactic means at its disposal to express negation, suggesting that negation is possibly one of the universal features of human language (Miestamo, 2007: 553; Horn, 2010a,b: 1). From a variety of perspectives, linguistic research has long been attempting to describe the different aspects of negation d its functional and structural properties, its role in language n, 1978; Dahl, 2010; Horn, 2010a,b; acquisition, its typological manifestations, and its neurological underpinnings (Givo Haspelmath, 2013; Serratrice and Allen, 2015; among many others). In recent years, however, the gestural realization of negation and its interface with the corresponding verbal negation have begun to receive scholarly attention. The interaction of certain gestures with verbal negation, the etymology of such gestures, and their functional description have recently been studied in several languages, such as Italian (Kendon, 2004: 248e264), English (Kendon, 2004: 248e264;
* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A. Inbar), [email protected] (L. Shor). 1 Both authors have contributed equally to this work. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.02.011 0378-2166/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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e, 2015), Russian (Grishina, 2015), Harrison, 2014a), German (Bressem and Müller, 2014), French (Harrison and Larrive Savosavo (Bressem et al., 2017), Polish (Antas and Gembalczyk, 2017), and Israeli Hebrew (Inbar, 2014; Inbar and Shor, 2017). These studies identified several gestural patterns associated with negation in various languages and showed that many of these patterns d most conspicuously the lateral headshake and various configurations of open-hand gestures d are shared by several languages and have comparable meanings and pragmatic functions.2 These findings not only suggest that these patterns constitute a culturally shared class of gestures, but also that these gestures might have a much wider cross-linguistic and cross-cultural distribution (Bressem et al., 2017: 176, 200e201). In addition, some of these studies have shown that gestures associated with negation can also accompany utterances that do not contain any explicit verbal markers of negation. These uses can be explained by assuming that these utterances involve some kind of implicit negation. Kendon (2004: 255e258), for example, mentions that Open Hand Prone gestures may accompany a description of a situation using a positive term, while implying that the same situation could have been described with a negative expression.3 The Open Hand Prone gesture can also accompany universal statements for which no exception is possible, and extreme positive assessments that imply that nothing else is as good as the evaluated object. Grishina (2015) provides a survey of contexts of covert negation in Russian, distinguishing between two subtypes: thematic covert negation and pragmatic covert negation. The former subtype relates to instances in which covert negation is derived from the lexical meaning of the particular lexeme and is not influenced by the communicative situation. Such lexemes are usually intensifiers and superlatives conveying the idea of totality or lack of exception. The latter subtype includes contexts in which covert negation is linked to the particular communicative situation in which the speaker is engaged. In these cases, ‘negative’ gestures may be involved in self-repairs, in indicating disagreement, in conveying a lesser degree of commitment toward the speaker's message, and in providing negative evaluation of the conveyed content. These recent findings originating in the study of gesture broaden the scope of negation from the mere presence of negative particles and the occurrence in a specific syntactic environment (Ayer, 1952) to an underlying cognitive domain that, in some contexts, may have only a gestural manifestation. These findings resonate with cognitive approaches to negation, such as the one developed by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996). Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk argued that the identity of negation does not depend solely on the overtly expressed negative words, and the negative identity of some linguistic units may be covert. In the present paper, we aim to contribute to this growing body of research by examining the various categories of covert negation in Israeli Hebrew, which can be uncovered by gestures. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 will present the corpus and methodology utilized in this study. Sections 3e7 will present the typology of verbal utterances that do not contain markers of grammatical negation and that may be accompanied by gestures associated with grammatical negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew. Moreover, we will try to explain why these patterns occur in the revealed contexts. Section 8 will provide a discussion of the data, followed by a short summary (Section 9).
2. Corpus and methodology In Israeli Hebrew, grammatical negation may be expressed on morphosyntactical, derivational, or lexical levels. Morphosyntactical negation is expressed by linguistic elements that negate a clause or one of its constituents. The particle lo serves as the main marker of negation and may be used in most grammatical contexts, negating verbal forms other than imperatives, as well as all kinds of non-verbal forms; the particle al is used to negate imperative verbs, conveying prohibition; the particle ejn is used in existential/possessive constructions. Derivational negation is expressed by prefixes that may be deployed in creating new negative lexemes, the main affixes being bilti-, i-, and a-, roughly comparable to the English prefixes dis-, in-, non-, and un-. Lexical negation includes the negative indefinites, the main forms being ʃum ‘no’/’any’, ʃum davar/klum‘no/any-thing’, af ecad ‘no/any-one’, and af paam ‘no time/n(ot)ever’ (Shor, forthcoming). Inbar and Shor (2017) identified recurrent gestural patterns that co-occur with grammatical negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and accounted for their forms and functions in terms of their conceptual foundations in primary metaphoric, spacemotion schematic, and force dynamic reasoning. It was shown that each of the three types of grammatical negation (morphosyntactical, derivational, and lexical) may be accompanied by any gesture from the following set of patterns: headshakes, ‘sweeping away’ gestures, ‘holding away’ gestures, ‘hands up’ gestures, ‘finger-wagging’ gestures, shoulder shrugs. However, the distribution of these gestural patterns may be explained in either cognitive or communicative terms (Inbar and Shor, 2017). The revealed gestural patterns are schematically illustrated in Fig. 1 below:
2 A concise literature review on various types of open hand gestures can be found in Bressem et al. (2017: 177). For more information on the cultural distribution of the headshake, as well as on its formal and functional variation, see Harrison (2014b). 3 The Open Hand Prone family includes gestures in which the hand is held with all digits extended and the forearm is in a prone position so that the palm of the hand faces either toward the ground or away from the speaker (Kendon, 2004: 248).
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Fig. 1. Overview of ‘negative’ gestures in Israeli Hebrew.4
Based on the typology of the revealed gestural patterns associated with grammatical negation in Israeli Hebrew, in the current study, we identified contexts that did not contain markers of grammatical negation in which these gestural patterns appeared. Since all gestural patterns were found to some extent occur in each context, in this paper we will not discuss their functional distribution in the revealed contexts. The present study is based on a 20-h corpus of TV interviews in Hebrew recorded between 2009 and 2017 with over 50 speakers. The interviews were selected from the TV programs Cross Israel, Room 101, and Soul Talk. The first one deals with Israeli society and with the processes that shape it in a variety of areas of life: science, culture, economics, and politics. The second one is a comedy television series with Israeli celebrities. The third one is formatted as a therapy session conducted by a well-known Israeli psychoanalyst who interviews prominent characters in Israeli society about their personal and professional lives. The age of the speakers in these programs is over 20. The programs document speakers filmed from the waist up. When examining the methodology applied in both studies e the current study and the previous one (Inbar and Shor, 2017) e a few additional remarks should be made. First, it should be noted that different patterns may be produced simultaneously, a common combination, for example, being a headshake with a ‘sweeping away’ gesture. Second, since the speakers were filmed seated, the pattern of going backward was not considered. Neither did we take into account facial expressions, since they were not always captured clearly. These two patterns d moving backward and specific facial expressions d may also convey the meaning of negation in Israeli Hebrew. Third, different performances of the revealed patterns d one-handed or two-handed, as well as single gesture or several repetitions of the chosen pattern d were considered as variations within the pattern that may reflect various degrees of intensity (Inbar and Shor, 2017). Finally, temporal synchrony between the gestural negation and verbal negation was somewhat variable d the onset of the ‘negative’ gesture was very often synchronized with the verbal negator, yet in some cases, the ‘negative’ gesture preceded or followed the verbal negator. In what follows, we will present the typology of the contexts that did not contain markers of grammatical negation in which the gestural patterns typically associated with grammatical negation appeared. Moreover, we will attempt to motivate the occurrence of these gestures within such contexts, proposing a semantic account.5
4 5
It should be noted that ‘sweeping away’ and ‘holding away’ are terms adopted from Bressem and Müller 2014. The tendency of particular gestural patterns to appear in particular contexts awaits future research.
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3. Words with negative meaning component The revealed gestural patterns were found to be coordinated with words such as kaʃe ‘difficult’, mesubac ‘complicated’, neelam ‘disappeared’, lehafsik ‘to stop’, met ‘die’, ibdu ‘lost’, lefarek ‘to take apart’, fisfast ‘missed’. Examples 1 and 2 illustrate some of these occurrences6 (1)
(2)
o ha¼toʦaa ʃel¼ha¼predot haele hu or DEF¼result of¼DEF¼break.ups these he ‘The effect or the result of these breakups is hard, is not good.’
ha¼cotam
DEF¼effect
j hu lo j he NEG
tov j good j
The utterance in (1) is produced by the interviewer who wonders whether the interviewee decided to stop making movies after one of his movies failed at the box office. Uttering lehafsik ‘to stop’, the interviewer moves his left hand from the center of his body to the periphery and produces a single lateral headshake (Patterns 1 and 2). In (2), the interviewer describes how the human brain reacts to breakup, and co-expressively with the word kaʃe ‘hard’, moves his left finger from side to side (Pattern 5), while producing multiple lateral headshakes (Pattern 1). Once he ceases to move his finger and shake his head, he produces the verbal negative phrase lo tov ‘not good’, which can be seen as retrospectively clarifying the covertly negative lexeme kaʃe ‘hard’. n (2001: 395) The connection between particular lexemes and negation has been discussed in linguistic literature. Givo refers to the phenomenon in terms of ‘inherent/lexical negation,’ and suggests that particular words, such as inherently negative modality verbs (‘lack’, ‘refuse’, ‘avoid’, and the like) have negative inference. Sovran (2014: Ch. 5) postulates that such lexemes share a Neg-element as a component of their lexical meaning, and that this element has a special status in the actual and mental lexicon. Sovran identifies four subdomains of Neg-element in the lexicon: the somatic-experiential (such as pain, fear, sorrow), interactional-social (such as rape, crime, violence), culture-dependent (such as hell, devil, doomsday), and prelogical (such as absence, missing, deviation). Co-occurrence of such lexemes with gestures that are usually coordinated with grammatical negation contributes to both hypotheses. We suggest that ‘negative gestures’ coordinated with such lexemes make this component of meaning visible and, consequently, accentuated. 4. Intensification ‘Negative gestures’ were found to appear in contexts of intensification, typically co-occurring with amplifiers, universal quantifiers, and intensifying adjectives. Amplifiers are words that indicate a high degree, or the highest degree, of some relevant scale. In our corpus, the amplifiers that co-occurred with negative gestures included the following: meod ‘very’, haci ‘the most’, harbe ‘a lot’, hamon ‘plenty’, bejoter ‘highly’, cadmaʃmait ‘unequivocally’, legamrej ‘totally’, lacalutin ‘completely’, bevadaj ‘definitely’, and beheclet ‘certainly’. Universal quantifiers such as hakol ‘everything’, kol ‘every, all’, or kulam ‘everyone’, contribute to intensification by implying that there are no exceptions. Intensifying adjectives such as madhima ‘astonishing’, nifla ‘wonderful’, or nehederet ‘amazing’ can be seen as containing an intensity component as part of their meaning. These uses are demonstrated in the following examples:
(3)
I-er
zot ʃeela caʃuva le¼historjon/ this question important to¼historian/ ‘Is that an important question for an historian?’ ladaat haim anaʃim to.know Q people ‘To know whether people are happy?’
I-ee
meuʃarim/ happy/
haci li ke¼historjon
caʃuva> j important> j
6 Transcription is usually broad phonetic. Glossing follows, mutatis mutandis, the Leipzig Glossing Rules
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(5)
I-er
ec margiʃa horut how feel parenthood ‘How does late parenthood feel?’
I-ee
I-ee
kol ma ʃe all what that ‘All I want to say is that her closet’
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meuceret/ late/
rotsa want
lehagid j to.say j
ʃe that
ben ʃnot takua ej.ʃam stuck somewhere between years ‘Is stuck somewhere between the 1990s to the 2000s.’
ha¼tiʃim DEF¼ninety
le¼ʃnot to¼years
ha¼alpaim jj DEF¼two.thousand jj
acʃav boj now come ‘Now, let me say that … ’
et¼ze ACC¼this -
ani I
ani I
agid I.will.tell
I-er
ʃe hi lo klomar it.means that she NEG she.updated/ ‘You mean, she did not update herself?’
I-ee
ʃe that
ha¼aron DEF¼closet
ʃela her
hitadkena/
ratsiti I.wanted
lehagid> jj to.say> jj
In (3), the interviewee, who is a historian, was asked a yeseno question regarding the significance of knowing whether people in a certain period were happy or not. He provides a positive response which is verbally intensified by means of the amplifier haci ‘the most’, and gesturally by moving the right hand from the center of his body to the periphery (Pattern 2), along with multiple lateral headshakes (Pattern 1). These gestures are co-expressive with the entire sentence zot ha¼ʃeela haci caʃuva ‘that is the most important question’. In (4), the interviewee uses the intensifying adjective nifla ‘wonderful’ as an answer to a content question, and accompanies it with a lateral headshake (Pattern 1). In (5), the interviewee discusses the fashion sense of a famous person. The interviewee's words imply that her clothes are ugly. She does not want to offend her, though, and says that her clothes are out of style. The interviewee adds ‘That's all I wanted to say’ in order to make it clear that nothing else should be inferred from the previous discourse, namely ‘her closet is stuck somewhere between the 1990s to the 2000s.’ The statement is conveyed in an intensified manner, which is created verbally by employing the universal quantifier kol ‘all’, and gesturally by raising both hands up (Pattern 4). Examples 3e5 suggest that domains of intensification and negation have some kind of conceptual affinity. This affinity can be motivated from different directions. From a semantic perspective, intensification can be taken as conveying a very high degree (if not the highest) of some relevant scale. At the same time, this degree can be construed as the denial of the rest of the scale, or of other relevant alternatives (cf. Kendon, 2004: 255e258). Thus, while the interviewee in (3) considers the question of happiness the most important one for a historian, he implicitly rejects any other relevant questions that can be regarded as important. By the same token, when the speaker in (4) evaluates late parenthood as being wonderful, she implicitly rejects any other possible evaluations that are weaker than the one she proposed. In (5), the quantifier kol ‘all’ modifies the previous discourse as an entire message, and that nothing else should be inferred but what was explicitly said. We suggest that such implicit rejection of weaker alternatives becomes visible by the accompanying ‘negative gestures.’ From an interactional perspective, intensification often serves as an argumentative resource for persuading the recipient, in the wake of possible objection on his part. From this vantage point, ‘negative gestures’ co-occurring with intensified statements can be interpreted as rejection of actual or implied objections to that statement (cf. Calbris, 2011: 174). Thus, the ‘negative gestures’ in (3) can be seen as rejecting the common view, underlying the interviewer's question, according to which historians are only interested in objective facts from the past, and not in people's feelings. Similarly, lateral headshake in (4) can be interpreted as rejection of possible objections to the speaker's claim. The ‘hands up’ gesture in (5) can be seen as protecting the speaker against an unwanted interpretation of her words. It is worth noting that a negation marker itself might be an intensifier, highlighting the information within its scope. This is the case with the utterances that contain a so-called ‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’ negation that occurs in ‘WHword þ that þ not’ constructions in Israeli Hebrew. Such constructions convey a meaning of positive intensification, despite the presence of a negative marker (Giora, 2006: 992e993; Shefer, 2017). Consider example (6): (6)
hajta she.was
ʃam j there j
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In (6), using a ‘WH-word þ that þ not’ construction, the speaker describes World War II survivors as being traumatized no matter where they came from, or each and every place they came from. Thus, the utterance ‘wherever they did not come from’ has emphatic positive interpretation despite the presence of a negative marker lo ‘not’. The negation in example (6) is coordinated with the headshake (Pattern 1) and the ‘sweeping away’ gesture (Pattern 2). We suggest that both gestures relate to the emphatic interpretation that this construction has in Hebrew. In this case, the ‘negative gestures’ intensify the implication arising from the utterance, namely, that there are no exceptions. 5. Indefinite modifiers ‘Negative gestures’ occasionally co-occur with indefinite modifiers and hedging expressions, such as ejze ‘some’, ejzeʃehu ‘some.SGM’, or ejzeʃehi ‘some.SGF’. In (7), the speaker uses a hedged expression ‘some play’ and accompanies it with a headshake:
(7)
ve hi nora raʦta <ʃe and she awful she.wanted
ani I
eʃlac I.will.send to.her
la some
ejzeʃehu macaze> j play> j
In (7), the interviewee describes how his daughter asked him to send her a play and accompanies this utterance with a headshake. The gesture seems to reflect the implication arising from the hedging, namely that he does not remember what kind of play it was exactly, and perhaps that the name of the play is not significant for his current purpose (cf. Grishina, 2015: 586). Thus, the use of the gesture may be seen as a refusal to commit to something. 6. Discourse particles The same gestural patterns were found to accompany discourse particles that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. One group of particles involves the so-called ‘restrictive’ or ‘exclusive’ particles, whose function is to focus on a particular entity, aspect, or interpretation of a situation, excluding other potential candidates and choices (Xiang, 2011: 1378e1380). The restrictive particles rak ‘only’, paʃut ‘just’, and zehu ‘that's it’ are only few examples that Israeli Hebrew has in its arsenal. The use of the particle rak ‘only’ is shown in (8) and (9): (8)
jeʃ
mesujam j specific j
ʦaric lehitlabeʃ j asur laʃevet lejad kaca thus should to.dress j forbidden to.sit near ‘That is how you should dress; it is forbidden to sit near boys.’
(9)
ha¼cadaʃ hu DEF¼new he ‘The new God is a loving god.’
ha¼elohim DEF¼god
zot
elohim god
banim j boys j
ohev j loving j
ahava j love j
The examples (8) and (9) were extracted from the same conversation in which the interviewee described how, after being raised in a strictly religious community, she realized that the things she had been told were not necessarily true. It was such a discovery that led her to find her own way of believing in God. In (8), the speaker presents a series of axioms she was told while growing up, the first of which is that ‘There is only God.’ This utterance invokes the interpretation ‘There is only God, and nothing else,’ which is emphasized by multiple lateral headshakes. Shory after the excerpt presented in (8), the same speaker produces the utterance in (9), in which she says that in contrast to the image of a god that dominated her religious upbringing, one that rewards the good and punishes the bad, she now chooses to believe in a ‘loving god’. The loving character of her newfound god is further highlighted by means of the restrictive utterance zot
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I-er
ve az be gil acatesre matcil ha¼mered and then in age eleven start DEF¼rebellion ‘And then at the age of eleven begins your rebellion against religion.’
91
ʃelac your
neged against
ha¼dat jj DEF¼religion jj
meod very
speʦifi specific
j hu katan j j he small j
ve hu j lefacot az em j and he j at.least then uhm j ‘And it is, at least then, surrounded by barriers (lit. fences).’
mukaf surrounded
be¼gderot j in¼fences j
ma kara/ what happened/ ‘What happened?’ I-ee
After being asked by the interviewer about the circumstances that made her rebel against religion at the age of eleven, the interviewee explains that it was the contrast she saw when she moved from a small and conservative town to a bigger city. She begins her explanation with the discourse marker paʃut ‘just’, and accompanies it with a lateral headshake. We suggest that in this case, the headshake visualizes restriction, which is part of the procedural meaning of the discourse marker paʃut, and together they signal that the interviewer should ignore any other assumptions he might have had regarding why she rebelled, in favor of her specific explanation. The discourse particle zehu ‘that's it’ has various functions in Israeli Hebrew, one of which is related to the meaning of restriction (Bardenstein et al., in press; Shor and Inbar, 2019). The restrictive zehu is occasionally accompanied by ‘negative gestures.’ Such an instance is shown in (11), in which the interviewee describes the scarcity of her meetings with her father, after her parents got divorced: (11)
ani zoceret ʃe kʃe I remember that when ‘I remember that when I was younger in Kiryat Arba’
joter more
ktana little
be¼kirjat arba in¼Kiryat Arba
az raiti oto harbe ki so I.saw him many because ‘I saw him (¼the speaker's father) a lot because he was living there,’
hu he
gar lived
ʃam j there j
ve j kʃe hajiti bat j kʃe avarnu and j when I.was old j when we.moved ‘And, when I was, when we moved to Netanya, I visited him once.’
le¼netanja to¼Netanya
az so
nasati I.rode
hu kvar avar he already moved ‘He already moved to Gedera,’
le¼gedera j to¼Gedera j
em j
zehu j this.he j
vj ejze ʃnej and j approximately two and approximately two family events.’
j eruim j events
hajiti I.was
elav to.him
paam j once j
miʃpactijim j family.related j
In (11), the interviewee describes how the frequency of her meetings with her father decreased after she and her family had moved to another city. After saying that during that period she only met her father once, the interviewee produces multiple lateral headshakes, followed by the marker zehu ‘that's it’, and then mentions two additional occasions. The lateral headshake in this context seems to anticipate the subsequent zehu, which has a restrictive interpretation, according to which only the meeting she mentioned had taken place, and not others. This interpretation is made visible by the headshake. Another example is the adverbial bixlal ‘at all, generally, especially’, which is strongly associated with negation, functioning as a discourse particle. This particle is often used as a negative polarity item that reinforces negation (Tsirkin-Sadan and Avigail, 2015). Such use is illustrated in (12): (12)
im paam hajiti gitarist j az ani lo if once I.was guitarist j so I NEG ‘Once I was a guitar player, so today I don't play at all.’
menagen play
hajom today
Prior to the example, the interviewee described himself as a person who does not like doing things he is not absolutely good at. Here, he exemplifies his claim by contrasting his past as a guitarist to his present, where he does not play the guitar at all. The discourse particle bixlal is accompanied by a single side-to-side movement of the raised left index finger (Pattern 5). Here, bixlal intensifies the grammatical negation expressed by lo ‘not’, thus emphasizing that there are no exceptions, and today the speaker does not play guitar on any occasion.
92 (13)
A. Inbar, L. Shor / Journal of Pragmatics 143 (2019) 85e95 ze haja raaʃ this it.was noise ‘It was a terrible noise for them’
norai awful
mibcinatam j for.them j
hahem
In (13), the interviewee, who is an Israeli rock singer, tells how his musical career began in the late 1970s: After stating that his music was once regarded as an awful noise, the interviewee adds a reference to the period he is talking about (the late 1970s) and modifies it with biclal ‘especially’, marking this period, and not others, as especially relevant. This addition intensifies his prior statement, since it construes his music as especially noisy d not only because rock music objectively tends to be loud, but also due to the specific period of time in which his music began to be heard. 7. Conversational implicatures In some instances, the discussed gestural patterns seem to be related to the conversational implicature arising from the verbal utterance. In these cases, the gesture conveys a separate message from that of the propositional content of the utterance. Example (14) demonstrates an instance in which an answer to an alternative question implies the rejection of one of the alternatives: (14)
I-er
basof hi j raʦta lamut j o in.the.end she j she.wanted to.die j or ‘In the end, did she want to die or did she still want to live?’
ʃe that
I-ee
ha¼acaron> jj DEF¼last> jj
ha¼rega DEF¼moment
hi she
od still
raʦta she.wanted
licjot/ to.live/
In (14), the interviewer mentions the final days of the interviewee's mother who had been battling cancer, and asks whether she still wanted to live at that point or preferred to die. The interviewee opts for the latter alternative, answering that her mother very much wanted to live, and accompanies her response with multiple lateral headshakes which denies the former one. Example (15) demonstrates an instance of a rhetorical yeseno question that implies a reversed state of affairs (Han, 2002: 202): (15)
haja rega ʃe at amart was moment that you you.told ‘Was there a moment when you said to yourself’
biclal at.all
ma ze
ʦrica need
le¼aʦmec j to¼yourself j
et¼ze>/ ACC¼this>/
tov>/ good>/
Prior to (15), the interviewer mentioned the difficult time the interviewee experienced during one of the political events she covered as a news anchor. In (15), the interviewer asks whether there was a moment when she asked herself the questions, ‘Do I really need it?’ and ‘What is it good for?’ In this context, the questions may be interpreted as ‘I don't really need it’ and ‘It is good for nothing.’ These implied negative assertions are visualized by a series of lateral headshakes produced by the speaker. Example (16) shows an information-seeking question that implies the questioner's lack of knowledge: (16)
I-ee
ve acʃav ani ovedet al¼sefer and now I work on¼book ‘And now I am working on another book,’
acer j other j
ʃe ulaj korim lo ʃem zmani that maybe call to.him name tentative ‘which will have the tentative title “An autobiography of a door.”’ I-er
otobiografja autobiography
ʃel¼delet jj of¼door jj
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93
After the interviewee talks about the new title of her upcoming book, the interviewer wonders why she chose that specific name. He accompanies his question with a lateral headshake. In this case, the gestures seem to reflect the presupposition underlying information-seeking questions, namely that the person asking the question does not know the answer. 8. Discussion In the previous sections (3e7), we have shown that a particular set of gestural patterns that had originally been identified by their co-occurrence with grammatical negation d headshakes, ‘sweeping away’ gestures, ‘holding away’ gestures, ‘hands up’ gestures, ‘finger-wagging’ gestures, and shrugs d may also accompany utterances that do not contain any grammatical markers of negation. However, all the contexts revealed are connected to negation on some cognitive level. When these gestures associated with words like absence, bad and the like, they emphasize the neg-element which is a component of their meaning. Using amplifiers, such as absolutely, totally, etc., can be taken as conveying a very high degree on some relevant scale that is construed as the denial of the rest of the scale or of other relevant alternatives (cf. Kendon, 2004: 255e258; Calbris, 2011: 174; Harrison, 2018: 133, 140). Universal quantifiers and so-called redundant negation may indicate rejection of any exception (cf. Calbris, 2011: 35; Harrison, 2018: 111). Intensifying adjectives such as amazing, astonishing etc., may indicate rejection of lower degrees on a relevant scale. Indefinite modifiers imply refusal to commit to the truthfulness or the exactness of the provided information (cf. Grishina, 2015: 586). The gestures associated with grammatical negation may also be coordinated with the specific discourse particles that imply negation or restriction as a part of their procedural meaning. Finally, negative meaning can be reconstructed as a conversational implicature, separately from that of the propositional content of the utterance. The occurrence of the same gestural patterns in all these contexts unifies them, and suggests that all of them share a meaning that is associated with grammatical negation. Taking a cognitive semantic perspective to negation, we argue that the occurrence of the gestures in the contexts described above suggests that these gestures indicate a higher abstract notion, namely ‘negativity’ rather than negation. The manifestation of ‘negativity’ in the lexicon was recently described by Sovran (2014: Ch.5), who concluded that ‘negativity’ is not a semantic field or a semantic frame, but rather a cross-domain conceptual element that originates in various levels of human needs and preferences. ‘Negativity’ is most clearly reflected in words associated with physical aversion and negative emotional feelings, such as pain and fear, where it is rooted in the somatic and psychic experience of each individual. The status of ‘negativity’ in words, such as violence and crime, is rooted not only in negative feelings of discomfort or threat, but also in the social or interactive domain, reflected in the fact that such words typically presuppose the existence of an aggressor and a victim. ‘Negativity’ is even less apparent in words, such as devil and hell, since the association of these words with negativity is gradually built through beliefs, mythologies, and worldviews. Finally, ‘negativity’ in words, such as absence and denial, is rooted in the human preference for existence, completeness, and functioning, and thus in these words ‘negativity’ is the opposite of the existing, the complete, and the functioning. Sovran's discussion of the concept of ‘negativity’ relies on the cognitive approach to negation, initiated by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996), which explores deeper levels than syntax and morphology to ‘cover the negation incorporated in words, discourse or knowledge frames.’ On this account, through the use of the particular gestures coordinated not only with overt or grammatical negation but also with covert negation, the notion of ‘negativity’ can manifest itself. Moreover, the gestures discussed in this paper indicate the notion of ‘negativity’ that resides not only on the lexical level, but also on syntactic and pragmatic levels, while the underlying meaning of ‘negativity’ becomes visible and potentially emphasized. Furthermore, it is worth noting that particular expressions that do not include any markers of negation may express negation or negativity on different stages of grammaticalization processes in which they are involved. For example, it has been shown that diachronically, inherently negative verbs, such as ‘fail’, ‘lack’, ‘refuse’, ‘decline’, or ‘avoid’, may give rise to negation-marking morphemes. In the process of grammaticalization, the verbs' specific semantic features are bleached out, n, 2001: 382e383). leaving only their negative inference (Heine and Kuteva, 2002: 188; Givo The connection between intensification and negation is also evident in language itself and may be manifested by semantic change. It has been shown that lexemes that originally convey strong negative meanings over time may develop intensified positive meanings or be used as intensifiers. Israeli Hebrew provides several examples of such development. The original meaning of the lexeme nora represented in Hebrew's earlier strata is ‘terrible, frightening’. This meaning contains a Negelement, which became dominant through the process of grammaticalization, and the word was used as a negative description, for example in mezeg avir nora ‘terrible weather’. Later, another process takes place in which the element of meaning connected with extremity or exaggeration is preserved, while the negative element is eroded. Thus, the lexeme nora, has come to be used in Israeli Hebrew as a general intensifier denoting ‘really, very’ that can be used in negative and positive contexts, for example nora jafe ‘very beautiful’. Similarly, the phrase caval al hazman, originally conveying negative meaning, namely ‘waste of time’, can be used as a general intensifier. This pattern of semantic change is not limited to the phrase level but can also be observed in the constructional level. For instance, a common way to express intensification in the domain of love/desire/adoration in Israeli Hebrew is by using the idiomatic construction [X PRD al Y] [‘X PRD on Y’], which employs negatively connotated predicates that are not obviously related to LOVE/DESIRE/ADORATION, but rather originate from the conceptual domains of DEATH (e.g., met ‘die’), ILLNESS (e.g., cole ‘sick/ ill’), INSANITY (e.g., meʃuga ‘crazy’), and ANNIHILATION (harus ‘devastated’) (Vardi, 2015). Vardi (2015: 45e46) suggests that these domains share similar elements of meaning such as passiveness, dysfunction, and totality d elements that are also associated
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with intense love. On the basis of their shared metonymies, metaphorical uses of ‘die’, ‘ill’, ‘insane’, and ‘devastated’ can express intensified ‘love/desire/adoration’. Furthermore, Vardi (2015: 46) mentions that employment of negatively connotated concepts for the purpose of negative as well as positive intensification can also be motivated by a cognitive-affective pattern, according to which negative experience (particularly related negative feelings and emotions) holds greater weight than positive emotions. As a result, negative experience has greater influence on behavior than positive experience does. We can see that the domains of negation and intensification intersect in the seemingly paradoxical uses of negative response particles in several languages as affirmative intensifiers, particularly in contexts of heightened emotion (e.g., Grishina, 2011; Shor, forthcoming). Negative particles can be used as ‘negative exclamatives’ conveying intensified positive evaluations and expressing the speaker's surprise or astonishment (Delfitto and Fiorin, 2014). A typical example of such use in Hebrew is the following sentence that was uttered by a Facebook user as a response to a picture uploaded by her friend: (17)
at mehamemet be¼ramot acerot. you astonishing in¼other levels. ‘No, you are totally astonishing.’
lo
NEG
One possible explanation would be to hypothesize that, on some cognitive level, speakers use standalone negators in order to reject potential and anticipated objections on the part of the recipient, ones that may weaken the speaker's overall position. As a result, the speakers' claims and descriptions are validated and intensified. Thus, the connection of ‘negativity’ with morphosyntactic negation as well as with other, non-negative domains may be evident from various linguistic data in different modalities. Such connections are further verified and expanded by gestural evidence presented in this paper. 9. Summary This article described various types of morpho-syntactically positive utterances that are often accompanied by a particular set of gestural patterns previously identified as associated with morpho-syntactically negative utterances in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of various types of morpho-syntactically positive utterances accompanied by ‘negative’ gestures revealed that all the contexts were connected to negation on some cognitive level. This led us to suggest that this set of gestural patterns indicate a higher abstract notion, namely ‘negativity’ rather than negation. ‘Negativity’ then can be manifested in diverse types of positive phrases and utterances d words with inherent negation, structures conveying intensification, discourse particles, indefinite modifiers, and as conversational implicatures. Morpho-syntactic negation, therefore, should be considered as only one possible expression of negativity. Moreover, it was shown that an inquiry of the interface between gestural and verbal modalities in one particular domain d in our case the domain of negation/negativity d can illuminate various expressions of that domain in the verbal modality. The association of gestures indicating ‘negativity’ with all kinds of contexts revealed in this study makes the connection between them visible. Furthermore, we showed that various linguistic expressions of that domain may be connected in verbal modality as well by various processes of grammaticalization. Finally, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments (De Ruiter, 2000; Kirchhof, 2011). Acknowledgements The previous versions of this paper were presented at The 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 10, 2017, and at The 8th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies e Gesture and Diversity, Cape Town, South Africa, on July 7, 2018. We are grateful to several participants of those conferences for their helpful comments. We would like to thank two anonymous referees for Journal of Pragmatics for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. All errors and infelicities that remain are our sole responsibility. We would like to thank Eyal Cremer for providing the drawings. References Aijmer, Karin, 2002. English discourse particles. Evidence from a corpus. Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 10. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Antas, Jolanta, Gembalczyk, Sonia, 2017. The bodily expression of negation in Polish. J. Multimodal Commun. Stud. 4 (1e2), 16e22. Ayer, Alfred Jules, 1952. Negation. J. Philos. 49, 797e815. Bardenstein, Ruthi, Shor, Leon, Inbar, Anna, 2019. Zehu ‘that's it’ as a Discourse Marker in Spoken Israeli Hebrew. Hebrew Linguistics [Balshanut 'ivrit]. [In Hebrew] in press. Bressem, Jana, Müller, Cornelia, 2014. The family of away-gestures: negation, refusal, and negative assessment. In: Müller, Cornelia, Cienki, Alan, Fricke, Ellen, Ladewig, Silva H., McNeill, David, Jana, Bressem (Eds.), BodydLanguagedCommunication: an International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction [Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.2]. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, pp. 1592e1604. Bressem, Jana, Stein, Nicole, Wegener, Claudia, 2017. Multimodal language use in Savosavo: refusing, excluding and negating with speech and gesture. Pragmatics 27 (2), 173e206. ve, 2011. Elements of Meaning in Gesture. John Benjamins, Philadelphia, PA. Calbris, Genevie Crystal, David, 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Blackwell, Oxford. € Dahl, Osten, 2010. Typology of negation. In: Horn, Laurence R. (Ed.), The Expression of Negation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 9e38.
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[Balshanut 'ivrit] 48, 17e29 [In Hebrew]. Anna Inbar is a lecturer in Levinsky College of Education and Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, Israel. Her main research is in the area of pragmatics and gesture studies, with an emphasis on expression of abstract notions in gestures and their conceptualization. Her current focus is on the use of different grammatical devices reflecting cognitive processes occurring in the mind of the speakers, and how the speakers manipulate grammar to construct reality differently according to their communicative purposes. Leon Shor is a lecturer in Achva Academic College and Kaye Academic College of Education, Israel. His research interests lie in the syntax and pragmatics of conversational language, making use of discourse-functional approaches to the study of spoken language, as well as of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. His current research focuses on expression of negation, referential discourse markers, and grammaticalization.