Body-directed gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond

•Three varieties of body-directed gestures are illustrated in a corpus of interviews.•Semiotic, morphological, and functional hallmarks of each variety are described.•Three conceptual processes motivating body-directed gestures are distinguished.•Body-directed gestures are compared to body-directed signs.

The prototypical pointing gesture is directed outward at concrete objects, people, or locations in the world. But in everyday discourse pointing gestures are also commonly directed inward, toward the body. Body-directed gestures are co-produced with a variety of spoken referents, from personal pronouns (I, we) to experiential concepts (belief, instinct), exhibit wide but motivated variation in handshapes and movement patterns, and involve conceptual processes whose prevalence in co-speech gesture has gone largely unexamined. Based on a corpus of 40 one-on-one interviews from the Tavis Smiley Show, three varieties of body-directed gestures—self-points, body-points, and body-anchors—are introduced and the semiotic and morphological characteristics of each variety are investigated. Body-directed gestures present a variegated subset of pointing gestures more generally, affording a novel vantage on pointing and its relation to speech, conceptual processes in everyday real-time behavior, and the role of the body as a foundational site for anchoring meaning of all kinds.