Viewpoint and stance in gesture: How a potential taboo topic may influence gestural viewpoint in recounting films

Thirty bilingual native speakers of both Luganda and Ugandan English were asked to recount, once in each language, a Ugandan short film revolving around the topic of adultery. Analyses revealed that gestural viewpoints varied depending on the verbally expressed evaluation of the potential taboo film segment. Positive verbal evaluation was accompanied by imitative character viewpoint gestures, i.e., the narrator included himself in the narrated event. By contrast, the semantic features displayed via observer viewpoint gestures yielded more possible interpretations and co-occurred with paraphrasing or moral judgment. Narrator viewpoint gestures correlated with literal reference highlighting the obviousness of the described actions. The term distancing narrator viewpoint is introduced to capture gestures that create a spatial distance between the narrator and the narrated event in the context of negatively framed verbal utterances.