Iconic aspects of communicative body postures and hand movements have always been a central issue in gesture research. From a Peircean perspective, a speaker’s body may become a living icon of someone or something else; or hands may trace - or otherwise form - iconic signs. 

However, largely due to varying understandings of similarity, iconicity in gesture is not uncontested, and questions of what exactly gestures are iconic of are not trivial.

Starting from an understanding of iconicity in gesture that goes beyond what is generally understood by the McNeillian concept iconics, this paper suggests that through combining Peirce’s semiotic theory with concepts central to cognitive linguistics, one may distinguish between distinct, yet typically interacting, sources and levels of iconicity in gesture. Peirce’s semiotics and cognitive linguistics share certain premises concerning the fundamental role of experience and embodiment, e.g., habits of thinking, acting, and intersubjective meaning-making. I present a first version of a spectrum of modality-specific manifestations of iconicity that spans from gestures metonymically derived from physical actions and organism-environment interactions, e.g., evoking embodied scenes and semantic frames (Fillmore), to highly schematic gestural patterns predominantly motivated by image schemas, force gestalts, and diagrammatic iconicity.

Narrowing in on deeply embodied structures and actions, I will highlight some flexible structural correspondences between image/force schemas and certain gestures (e.g., Mittelberg 2018). This is to account for the fact that gestures often only consist of evanescent, metonymically reduced hand configurations, motion onsets or movement traces that suggest, for instance, the idea of a PATH, CONTAINMENT, BALANCE, or RESISTANCE. Such schematic semiotic gestalts typically participate in more complex multimodal construal operations involving, for instance, metonymy, metaphor, frames, and constructions.

Examples of the different gestural patterns are enriched by motion-capture data stemming from American English and German multimodal discourse. It will thus be shown how numeric kinetic data allow gesture researchers to visualize and analyze otherwise invisible motion traces and thus provide augmented, 3D digital insights into the dynamic, gestalt-like nature of bodily enacted icons exhibiting various degrees of schematicity. This take on gesture semiotics will hopefully spur a discussion of possible implications for the broader field of body semiotics.

• Mittelberg, Irene (2008). Peircean semiotics meets conceptual metaphor: Iconic modes in gestural representations of grammar. In A. Cienki and C. Müller (eds.), Metaphor and Gesture.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 115-154.
• Mittelberg, Irene (2014). Gestures and iconicity. In C. Müller, D. McNeill, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, and J. Bressem (eds.), Body – Language –Communication (38.2). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 1712–1732.
• Mittelberg, Irene (2018). Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts: A dynamic systems approach augmented with motion-capture data analyses. Cognitive Semiotics 11 (1).
• Mittelberg, Irene (2019a). Peirce’s universal categories: On their potential for gesture theory and multimodal analysis. Semiotica 228: 193–222.
• Mittelberg, Irene (2019b). Visuo-kinetic signs are inherently metonymic: How embodied metonymy motivates forms, functions, and schematic patterns in gesture. Frontiers in Psychology https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00254
• 
  

Irene Mittelberg is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics at the Institute for English, American, and Romance Studies of RWTH Aachen University. She co-directs the Centre for Sign Language and Gesture (SignGes) and founded the Cognitive Semiotics Gesture Lab, a gesture research lab equipped with motion-capture technology. 

Mittelberg holds an M.A. in French linguistics and art history from Hamburg University as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. in linguistics and cognitive studies from Cornell University. Her work combines the semiotic theories of Charles S. Peirce and Roman Jakobson with contemporary embodied approaches to language, cognition, and multimodal interaction, notably to examine how image schemas, iconicity, metonymy, metaphor, viewpoint, and frames motivate coverbal gestures. Another focus is comparing processes of sign formation and the use of space in gesture, and the visual arts. Recent interdisciplinary work includes pattern analysis in kinetic gesture data and operationalizing Peirce’s universal categories for semiotic and neuroscientific research into gesture. She published a monograph on Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Gesture (2006), co-edited Methods in Cognitive Linguistics (2007), edited a special issue on gesture for Sprache und Literatur (2010), and has (co-)published over 50 journal articles/books chapters.