Communicative functions of gestures as components of deictic gesture-verbal utterances in the American entertaining television interview

Abstract

The article analyses examples of deictic gesture-verbal utterances in the context of the American entertaining television interview. It is brought to light that as components of gesture-verbal utterances deictic gestures perform the informative function by activating the visual channel of perception and the structures of the communicants’ ontological knowledge, serving as a background for identification, classification and qualification of the entities that are objects of reference. These entities are parts of non-lingual perceptive context of the analyzed cognitive-communicative interaction acts. In these acts, deictic gestures indicate: a) referent-addressers / addressees / third parties – person deixis; b) referent-objects – object deixis; c) spatial coordinates of referents – spatial deixis. Gesture deictic components point at the referent while verbal deictic components either point at, or name, or implicate the referent. Deictic gestures complement verbal components of communication and interact with them according to the principle of coordination or subordination.