Revisiting Significant Action and Gesture Categorization

As the field of gesture studies has developed researchers have created ways of analysing and categorizing bodily movement phenomena. In this paper we look at whether gesture categorizations have any resonance with the ways that people other than gesture researchers approach bodily movement. Building on Kendon's observations that people generally have a consistent attitude towards what constitutes ‘significant action’, we asked 12 participants to conceptualize their own categories of gesture and then analyse a short video that contained a predetermined variety of bodily movements. We found that non-analysts had a wider conception of what constituted gesture than analysts. In regards to the categorizations of gesture that non-analysts made, there were a range of schemas, which we broadly categorized as being ‘form-based’ and ‘function-based’.