| In black urban township communities in the province of Gauteng in South Africa, gesture is a prominent feature of everyday communication, and a large vocabulary of conventional gestures is in use particularly among male youth. Many of these gestures are quotable in that they can be used independently of speech and recalled like words or phrases in spoken language. How to account for the prominence of gesture and the large repertoires of quotable gestures that have developed in some cultures is the central question of this study. Using an ethnographic sociolinguistic approach involving elicitation and decoding interviews, video-recordings of gestural use in authentic situations, interviews, and observation, this work identifies and documents the repertoire of quotable gestures in use and examines what gesture affords its users as a means of communication in one township community. A total of 143 quotable gestures were identified in daily use. Based on an analysis of their semantic and structural nature, quotable gestures could be divided into three categories: lexical, holophrastic, and conceptual. These semanticogrammatical categories link directly to the functions gestures fulfill in everyday interactions. Quotable gestures range from those that fulfill immediate practical needs with limited function to conceptual gestures that are polysemous expressing a range of meanings and functions that reflect and articulate core cultural notions and sociointeractional functions. The prominence of gesture and development of a large repertoire of quotable gestures can be related to: the essential role of gesture in performance that translates into status for young men in their social networks; the stylization and significance of the body for purposes of visual identification in public spaces on the township streets in a volatile and threatening environment; practical communicative needs in relation to the social structure of young men's groups and material conditions in the township where much of everyday life takes place in the public domain; cultural norms of interaction where certain types of communicative acts are more effectively articulated through gesture than speech; and key cultural concerns in township society. |
