Gestures and Emblems: A Discussion with Lauren Gawne

·34 min·3 clips

Lauren Gawne reveals why a thumbs up is more like a word than a gesture, with meanings that can flip across cultures.

Host Bryn Quick interviews Dr. Lauren Gawne, a senior lecturer at La Trobe University and co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast, about her 2024 paper co-authored with Dr. Kenzie Cooper-Ryder titled 'Emblems, Meaning at the Interface of Language and Gesture.' Gawne defines emblems as gestures with standard forms and meanings that can function independently of speech, such as thumbs up or OK signs. She contrasts emblems with other gestures that illustrate speech content, like showing the size of a kitten. Gawne discusses cultural variation in emblems, noting that the thumbs up is not universally positive and the OK sign has different meanings in Japan, Greece, and France. She highlights the spread of emblems through online culture, such as Korean finger hearts from K-pop fandom and the Hunger Games salute used in pro-democracy protests. Gawne addresses the relationship between emoji and gestures, explaining how emoji like hand shapes or hearts parallel gesture functions and are not universal. She mentions challenges in documenting emblem diversity due to internet convergence and the difficulty of submitting emblem requests to Unicode. Gawne explores legal implications, citing cases where thumbs up emblems led to contract disputes in Canada and Australia. She emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of emblem research, involving linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and law. Gawne notes that emblems are sometimes adopted into signed languages as full words. She recommends episodes of Lingthusiasm on gesture and emoji, and mentions her upcoming book 'A Slim Guide to Gesture.' The episode concludes with a call to subscribe to the podcast.

As heard by us

A thoughtful look at how gestures gather meaning across culture, screens, and protest.

This PlayNext episode treats hand gestures as small acts with large social weight: a way to manage relationships, show agreement or refusal, or carry political force. Lauren Gaughan is especially good on why emblems remain hard to study.

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Why you'd press play

When emoji, memes, and a three-finger gesture start sharing a vocabulary, you have a language question worth pressing play for.

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