Gesture and pragmatics: From paralinguistic to variably linguistic

Gesture studies has grown as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, and further developments in approaches focusing on language use – including ones as diverse as cognitive linguistics and conversation/interaction analysis – are giving rise to a variably multimodal approach to language. Another context in which gesture research has been connected to pragmatics is when linguists look at 'border phenomena' in their field. Gesture is often considered to play a pragmatic role in some research because of assumed dichotomy between verbal and nonverbal communication. Another area in which pragmatic implications of gesture use have been examined is in various contexts of human–computer interaction, for example, trying to get robots and virtual agents to behave in ways that humans find pragmatically appropriate. Palm-up open-hand (PUOH) gestures serve a range of functions, from displaying a small object to an addressee on open palm, to holding out open hand when introducing an idea or a question, to indicating that one does not know something.