Gesture Indicates Absence

Accepted in 2021 for publication in Gesture.
Please cite published version

when available. 1
A spread-fingered hand torque as an indicator of

absence among Northern Pastaza Kichwa speakers
in Ecuador
Alexander Rice
University of Alberta
In this paper I posit the use of a spread-fingered hand torque gesture among
speakers of Northern Pastaza Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador) as a recurrent gesture
conveying the semantic theme of ABSENCE. The data come from a documentary
video corpus collected by multiple researchers. The gesture prototypically takes the
form of at least one pair of rapid rotations of the palm (the torque). Fingers can be
spread or slightly flexed towards the palm to varying degrees. This gesture is
performed in a consistent manner across speakers (and expressions) and co-occurs
with a set of speech strings with related semantic meanings. Taking a cognitive
linguistic approach, I analyse the form, function, and contexts of this gesture and
argue that, taken together, it should be considered a recurrent gesture that indicates
ABSENCE .
Keywords: Ecuadorian Quechuan, co-speech gesture, recurrent gesture, absence
Introduction
In Ecuador there is a common gesture in which one or both palms are rapidly torqued one
or more times. The gesture is used in conjunction with a specific type of verbal expression
and is recognized as a marker of ABSENCE. In this paper, I focus on its use by speakers of
Northern Pastaza Kichwa, an Indigenous language spoken in Ecuador. Using data from a
documentary video corpus, I provide an analysis of what I am calling the spread-fingered
hand torque (hereafter SFHT) gesture in the context of speech. My analysis is based on a
cognitive linguistic approach to data, focused as it is on contextual usage and the
assumption that form and meaning are inseparable. This analysis includes a discussion of
the gesture’s kinesic features as well as its functions through examination of various
contexts of use across a range of speakers and narrative and conversation genres. Based on
this analysis, I posit that the SFHT is a recurrent gesture along the lines of Ladewig and
Bressem (2013), who define any such stable form-meaning pairing between a semantic and
formational (kinesic) core as recurrent.1
The salient characteristics of the kinesics of the SFHT are the handshape (the hand
1
Cf. “co-speech gesture” (Kendon 2004; McNeill 1992) and “composite utterance” (Enfield 2009).
Accepted in 2021 for publication in Gesture. Please cite published version
when available. 2
is open with a generally flat or slightly concave palms and the fingers spread with varying
degrees of extension away from the palm) and the aforementioned torquing motion. The
semantic core is that of ABSENCE, in which the absence of some referent, event, or epistemic
quality is communicated. The form of the SFHT is shown in a still image in Figure 1 along
with the context of use in (1) whose meaning suggests a missing object. The speaker is
telling a traditional story of a large mythic bird that terrorized people in the upper Amazon
as they traveled the rivers searching for salt. The travelers arrive at a village only to find
that there is no salt there. The speaker uses the SFHT to underscore the absence of salt.
This and all other examples used in this paper come from a documentary video
corpus of approximately nine hours, described at length in Section 3. The key episodes are
transcribed, glossed, and include an English translation. The co-occurring phrases are
bolded and the gestures in the examples are represented with Kendon’s (2004) convention
of indicating the target gestural stroke with asterisks (***) above the transcription. Readers
can also view a video of the clips containing the tokens used in this study; access to this file
is described in Section 3. All interlinear glosses follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules (Bickel,
Comrie & Haspelmath 2008).2
Figure 1. The speaker, Eulodia, performing the SFHT (Token 37, qvz001 8:02, token reel
7:52)
(1) *****************
ña kachi mana tiya-g a-shka-y kay llakta-ta
now salt NEG be-AT COP-PERF-LOC this village-DAT
‘now there was no salt at this village’
2
Glossing abbreviations: 1: first person, 3: third person, ACC: accusative, ADD: additive, ADV: adverbial,
ANTIC: anti-causative, AT: attributive, CAUS: causative, COP: copula, COR: coreference, DAT: dative, DUR:
durative, EVS: evidential-self, FUT: future, IDEO: ideophone, IMP: imperative, INF: infinitive, INST:
instrumental, INT: interrogative, LIM: limitative, LOC: locative, MIR: mirative, NEG: negative, NMLZ:
nominalizer, PERF: perfective, PL: plural, PRT: particle, PST: past, PURP: purposive, Q: polar-question, SWRF:
switch-reference, TOP: topic.
when available. 3
The example in (1) illustrates REFERENTIAL ABSENCE, since the focused-upon item, salt, is
the physical entity absent from a physical place. The SFHT is used with other kinds of
absence as well, particularly what I term RELATIONAL ABSENCE, in which an event or action
is absent, such as the firing of a gun, the noisy activities of toucans, or a perceived lack of
sociability among young people. Some of the examples in this corpus also show an
EPISTEMIC ABSENCE, in which a speaker may express a lack of knowledge or disagree with
the validity of a proposition. While there is some variation in the types of absence that co-
occur with this gesture, ABSENCE does appear to be at the semantic core of the SFHT.
This paper presents an analysis of both the form and meaning of this gesture and
makes the case that the hand shape (spread-fingered open hand) and motion (the torque) are
used consistently and reliably with notions of ABSENCE, thus making the SFHT a candidate
recurrent gesture for speakers of Northern Pastaza Kichwa. The paper is laid out as follows:
first, I provide a brief introduction to the language and its speakers in Section 2. In Section
3, I outline the corpus and methods used to collect and annotate the data. In Section 4, I use
examples to present the form or kinesic core of the SFHT, followed by a description of the
contexts of its use in Section 5. In Section 6, I discuss why the form and meaning might
pair in the way that they do, drawing on cognitive linguistic notions of image schemata and
embodiment as metaphor. I then conclude with an overview and note some useful
directions for further research.
Background on the language and the SFHT gesture in the Ecuadorian

context
Northern Pastaza Kichwa (ISO 639-3: qvz; hereafter, NPK) is a variety of Quechua spoken
in the Ecuadorian lowlands and Peru whose speakers number between 10,000 (Eberhard,
Simons & Fennig 2020) and 30,000 (Moseley, 2010) persons, most of whom are located in
the province of Pastaza in Ecuador. NPK has been known by several other names, including
Bobonaza Quichua, Canelos Quichua, Pastaza Quechua, and Pastaza Quichua. “Quichua” is
the traditional term used to refer to the varieties of Quechua in Ecuador and is the most
frequently encountered ethnonym in the descriptive literature to date. The use of “Kichwa”
is more recent and comes from the standardized orthography called Kichwa Unificado or
Unified Quechua (Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador 2009). The choice between the
two spellings can be a contentious issue (Limerick 2017). In this paper, I use the “Kichwa”
spelling and some conventions of Unified Kichwa’s orthographic system to represent
when available. 4
written NPK.3 I do this out of respect for the efforts of Indigenous language activists in
Ecuador.4
The endonym for NPK is Runa shimi (lit. ‘human language’), although this is also
true for other Quechuan varieties in Ecuador. Many NPK speakers are comfortable with the
exonym Kichwa for their language and will sometimes use it even when speaking NPK.
Traditionally, NPK was considered to be one of many mutually intelligible varieties of a
single Kichwa language in Ecuador. However, recent research makes the case for
recognizing at least two distinct Ecuadorian Quechuan languages, one spoken in the
Andean highlands and the other in the Amazonian lowlands (Gómez Rendón 2008; Haboud
2010; O’Rourke & Swanson 2013; Grzech, Schwarz & Ennis 2019; Muysken 2019). I
follow previous analyses in which NPK is taken to be one of three mutually intelligible
dialects of “Amazonian Kichwa”. Figure 2 shows a map of the varieties of Kichwa in
Ecuador. NPK and its sister dialects, Tena Lowland Kichwa (ISO 639-3: quw) and Napo
Kichwa (ISO 639-3: qvo) are shown in the right of the map in the eastern provinces of
Ecuador. Figure 2 also shows varieties of Ecuadorian Highland Kichwa and Inga
(Colombian Quechua).
3
I follow Unified Kichwa’s orthography principally by using the orthographs [k], [sh], [ts], and [w], which
are not present in the previous hispanicized orthographies. I find the inclusion of these orthographs helpful
because they more closely approximate NPK’s IPA phonemic inventory. I do not, however, follow Unified
Kichwa in collapsing voiced and unvoiced obstruents into [p], [t], and [k]. Consult Limerick (2017) for more
detailed discussion of the issues surrounding the competing orthographies.
4
Many of speakers I work with prefer “Kichwa” or “Kichua” over “Quichua” and use some of the
standardized orthographic conventions from Kichwa Unificado, but these consultants otherwise profess
ignorance of the standardized form or else openly oppose it for various reasons. Consult Grzech et al. (2019)
for more discussion.
when available. 5
Figure 2. Varieties of Quechua in Ecuador (Aschmann, 2006)

Some NPK speakers still live within traditional communities on the banks of Pastaza’s
many rivers. Many others, however, have migrated to urban centres due to changing
economic and environmental conditions (Davis et al. 2017; Muratorio 1998: 265) and are,
thus, more directly integrated into the national culture. Most NPK speakers are presumed to
be multilingual, all (including elders) possess at least some competence in Spanish, the
national language of Ecuador. Many also speak Achuar-Shiwiar (ISO 639-3: acu), a
Chicham language of the same area, as intermarriage between speakers of both languages
has been common (Whitten 1976: 7). Muysken (2000) describes Amazonian Kichwa as a
potentially pidginized form of Quechua that arose as speakers of unrelated Amazonian
language families shifted to one or more varieties of Quechua from the Ecuadorian
Highlands in a relatively short period of time in the post-colonial period. The result was
three distinct but mutually intelligible varieties (Orr & Wrisley 1981) that are now referred
to collectively as Amazonian Kichwa (Grzech et al., 2019; A. Rice, 2020). The earliest
descriptions of NPK come from Dominican missionaries in the 1920s (León 1927; 1929;
1939). Further description of NPK in the following decades (1940s-1970s) came from
when available. 6
Carolyn Orr and others associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (1962; 1978;
Orr & Wrisley 1981; 1991). Nearly all additional linguistic descriptive work since the
1980s has been done by Janis Nuckolls, with whom I have been working, along with a
variety of NPK speakers, since 2013.
Much of Nuckolls’ work focuses on the usage of ideophones in NPK (1990; 1996;
2001; Nuckolls et al. 2016). Ideophones are a highly salient feature of NPK, their usage can
indicate fluency typical of native speakers (Nuckolls 2014: 356) and they do a significant
degree of semantic legwork in the language such as depicting movement and perspective
(Nuckolls et al. 2017). Ideophones in NPK are often more pragmatically salient than verbs
and sometimes even replace verbs altogether (Nuckolls 2014: 369). Ideophones by their
nature are embodied language forms and Nuckolls (2012: 9) describes them as “forms that
draw from the body’s perceptions, experiences, and ways of inhabiting the world” and are
“comprehended though one’s own bodily experiences”. Speakers of NPK often gesture
while using ideophones (Nuckolls et al. 2017: 156) and Nuckolls has shown that there is
systematicity in how some types of gestures and ideophones co-occur (Nuckolls 2020a).
In drawing this attention to meaning and embodiment, Nuckolls follows the
tradition of cognitive linguistics, in which describing largely oral Indigenous/minority
languages requires prioritizing semantics (Talmy 1975), spontaneous interactional language
use (Enfield & Levinson 2006), context, metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), the
inseparability of form and meaning (Chafe 1970), and forms of embodiment
(multimodality), while at the same time, eschewing arcane theoretical formalisms, context-
independent examples, and emphasis on structure (at the expense of meaning) typical of
universalist and generativist approaches to language data (Rice, 2017, p. 56). In this,
cognitive linguistics shares many of the same core tenets as gesture studies/multimodal
linguistics (Müller, Ladewig & Bressem 2013), especially with regards to embodiment,
metaphor, and the relationship between form and meaning.
Nuckolls’ work (and this paper) thus contribute to a growing body of work
integrating Indigenous/minority language documentation and description with gesture
studies/multimodal linguistics. I contend that this integration is mutually beneficial. For
example, including video data and analysis of gesture and metaphor in a minority language
documentation project can provide additional insight into a language’s deictic system
(Shapero 2014; Enfield 2001; Cooperrider & Núñez 2012; Nuckolls, Swanson & Spencer
2015). Gesture studies/multimodal linguistics (often limited to standard average European
languages) benefit from the inclusion of understudied minority languages in broadening our
understanding of universal cognitive patterns, metaphor, and forms of multimodal language
use at large (Gawne 2018; Brown 2014; Sandoval 2014; Núñez & Sweetser 2006; Rice
2012; 2014; 2017; Evans & Levinson 2009; Floyd et al. 2016). This is especially important
as minority language communities tend to have more older, non-literate members with
when available. 7
limited access to education. These speakers may preserve unique metaphors and
embodiment strategies that younger educated speakers may not use due to integration and
linguistic assimilation with the increasingly globalized world (Reiter 2014: 1191).
This tendency of gestural attrition under contact is underscored by the possibility that
NPK speakers may have adopted the SFHT from another language community, as the use of
the SFHT is fairly widespread in Ecuador by speakers of multiple languages. To try and
gauge the extant of the use of the SFHT, I showed a GIF (animated image) of the gesture
without any context to several speakers of Indigenous Amazonian languages in Ecuador with
whom I am connected on social media. I asked them to tell me what they think it meant.
Speakers of NPK, Tena Lowland Kichwa, and Achuar-Shiwiar told me that it means that
‘something is gone/missing/not present’. At my request, a colleague, Noah Diewald, also
showed it to speakers of the language isolate Wao Tedeo (also known as Huaorani, ISO 639-
3: auc) and reported that they also attributed the same meanings of absence to it. The SFHT
as a marker of absence is also common in Ecuadorian Highland Kichwa but is not known to
be used by speakers of Ecuador’s coastal Indigenous languages (Floyd 2018).5
Significantly, the SFHT is also used by the general Ecuadorian populace6 who are
primarily monolingual Spanish speakers. I contacted a half-dozen Ecuadorian Spanish
speakers and showed them the GIF and got similar results: they said it means no hay ‘there
is none’. I also asked an online community of Ecuadorians on Reddit7 what they thought
the gesture meant, using the same GIF. Of the 26 total responses, four said it means only
más o menos ‘more or less’, analogous to the French comme ci comme ça ‘so-so’, a ‘more
or less’ gesture familiar to speakers of western European languages in which the kinesic
core, an alternating movement of the head or hand, is associated with semantic cores such
as HESITATION and/or APPROXIMATION (Calbris 1990: 80–81). This gesture might be
produced in response to a question like How was the movie? accompanied by a speech
string such as Ehhh…so-so. The rotation of the hand (albeit, likely slower than how the
NPK speakers perform the SFHT) could be seen as oscillating between two limits, ‘good’
and ‘bad’. The speaker thus communicates ambivalence and lack of commitment to either
extreme limit as in: The movie was neither good nor bad, just so-so.
Seven of the responses indicated that it meant only no hay, which is consistent with
the general theme of ABSENCE that I posit for the SFHT in NPK. 15 of the 26 responses said
the gesture could be used to indicate both más o menos and no hay. While the discourse
context can likely account for the different uses of the same gestural form, some responses
indicated kinesic distinctions between the use of the gesture with más o menos and with no
5
Floyd uses ‘negative-existential’ as a label for this gesture.
6
Most of the hispanophones consulted live in the interior highland region of Ecuador, only two live on the
coast. It is possible that the gesture as an indication of ‘there is no X’ is less common in the coastal region.
7
https://www.reddit.com/r/ecuador/comments/hb9m9l/pregunta_sobre_un_gestose%C3%B1a_de_ecuador/
when available. 8
hay X. One of the most upvoted responses indicated that the use of one hand would be más
o menos, while the use of two would mean no hay. Four of the responses indicated that
performing the gesture slowly would mean más o menos while performing it would quickly
would mean no hay. Three responses said that gesture means más o menos if the hand were
held horizontally (palm oriented down) while performing the torques, and vertically (palm
facing the other side of the body) for no hay.
The vertical/horizontal distinction between no hay and más o menos also exists in
the usage of the SFHT in Ecuadorian Sign Language (CNID 2014). The sign for no hay and
no vale (‘no good’, ‘does not work’, ‘has no value’, etc.) 8 is identical to 50% of the SFHT
tokens found in the NPK corpus (cf. §4) in which the hand is torqued around a vertical axis
and can be performed with one or both hands.9 The sign for más o menos torques around a
horizontal axis (palm oriented down), which is the case for 11% of the tokens in the corpus.
However, the manual articulation must also accompanied by facial articulations,
specifically, arched eyebrows, the closing of one eye, and pursed lips or an open mouth
with rounded lips.10
The fact that most of the Reddit responses indicated that the gesture could be
interpreted as either más o menos or no hay is a possible indication of the aforementioned
linguistic assimilation of younger speakers. All of the responses were from social media-
using Ecuadorians, likely young adults more educated and more familiar with foreign
(especially Spanish and North American) media. Thus, this may represent a shift in this
particular co-speech gesture due to influence from or exposure to a globalized video-based
media.
With the caveat that this information is anecdotal, it does appear that the SFHT as
an indicator of ABSENCE is widespread in Ecuador among multiple language communities. I
also made a small attempt to determine the full extent of the use of SFHT beyond Ecuador.
I showed the same GIF to Spanish speakers from Peru and Colombia (Ecuador’s
neighbouring countries), thinking that perhaps the SFHT is a common gesture of the
Andean region of South America. However, Peruvian (6 responses) and Colombian (13
responses) speakers associated the gesture only with más o menos. I also asked speakers
from various hispanophone countries in my local community what they thought this gesture
meant and got the same más o menos responses. Again, as mentioned previously, these
speakers are likely more educated and more integrated with global linguistic and cultural
trends. This very fragmentary information indicates that the use of the SFHT as an indicator
of ABSENCE appears to be unique to Ecuador, but clearly a more focused approach with
8
http://www.plataformaconadis.gob.ec/~platafor/diccionario/?st_kb=no-hay
9
http://www.plataformaconadis.gob.ec/~platafor/diccionario/?st_kb=no-hay-sistema
10
http://www.plataformaconadis.gob.ec/~platafor/diccionario/?st_kb=mas-o-menos
when available. 9
more data is needed.

This raises the question of where the gesture originated. Pinpointing the origin or
source of a particular gesture with any certainty is improbable but we can speculate about
scenarios in which its maintenance and spread would be likely. Perhaps the gesture was
used by some Indigenous groups in Ecuador as part of a trade sign language or pidgin and
was later adopted by the emerging hispanophone population in the context of buying,
selling, and exchanging goods in market places. Having a gesture to indicate that one lacks
a means of exchange or a particular good would be useful for people who do not share a
common language. Another possible scenario involves the SFHT being a remnant of
colonial-era Spanish. This seems unlikely, because the gesture and associated meaning of
ABSENCE seems limited to Ecuador and more specifically to the more recently colonized
highland and Amazonian regions.
Several of the Ecuadorians I asked offered scenarios in which the SFHT would
commonly be used. One Spanish speaker explained to me that the gesture can be used
without speech in response to a question about the presence or absence of a particular
object. The speaker offered a scenario in which a mother sends her child to a market to
purchase rice. Upon returning empty-handed, the mother asks the child, Where is the rice?,
and the child can respond simply by performing the SFHT to indicate there was no rice
available at the market. Others said the SFHT is useful to communicate no hay at a distance
when the interlocuter is out of earshot but within the line of sight. A Tena Lowland Kichwa
speaker said that the gesture is commonly employed by men hunting wild game in the
rainforest. While keeping silent, one could catch the attention of the other hunters and
perform the gestures with the meaning of There is nothing over here.
These responses offering contexts in which the SFHT is used without speech
suggests that the gesture may have a higher level of conventionalization than indicated by
the video data used for this paper. Manual gestures can exhibit varying degrees of
conventionalization (Kendon 1995; McNeill 2005; Ladewig 2014; Ekman & Friesen 1969).
Some gestures exhibit a low degree of conventionalization and are highly idiosyncratic and
spontaneous. These relatively unconventional gestures have been referred to as
“illustrators” (Ekman & Friesen 1969: 68; Kendon 1997: 118) and are not likely to be
understood in isolation (without accompanying speech and context). Recurrent gestures
have a moderate degree of conventionalization and obligatoriness when co-occurring with a
speech-string to make the semantic core clear (Müller 2017). Emblematic gestures, are
more highly conventionalized (in a given speaker community) and, thus, can be understood
without an accompanying speech string (Kendon 1995; Ekman & Friesen 1969; McNeill
1992). The use of the “thumbs up” gesture in English and many other languages is a
commonly given example of an emblematic gesture. Sign languages make use of even more
conventionalized gestures, as the signs are used as lexical items, phrases, and grammatical
when available. 10
markers. Given the seemingly highly conventionalized nature of the SFHT, the gesture was
likely incorporated into Ecuadorian Sign Language.11
I suspect that NPK speakers also use SFHT as an emblematic gesture, but in the
data I have collected, there are no unambiguous emblematic uses of the SFHT. 12 Thus, I
limit my analysis of the SFHT to being, at least, a recurrent, co-speech gesture in NPK.
Corpus and methodology

The gestures analyzed in this paper are drawn from video recordings collected between
2011 and 2019 by multiple researchers. The majority of the recordings in the corpus were
collected by Tod Swanson and Janis Nuckolls. Some of the videos are publicly accessible
on Swanson’s (Swanson)13 and Nuckolls’ (Nuckolls)14 YouTube channels, and their online
ideophone corpus (Nuckolls, Browne & Swanson 2014)15. All other recordings were
collected by the author and are archived with AILLA (A. Rice, 2019)16. Table 1 provides
citation information for the videos which have been archived or are otherwise publicly
accessible. For videos that are neither archived nor publicly accessible, the name of the
collector is provided.
The corpus used for this paper is comprised of approximately nine hours of video
recordings (73 videos). All of the videos have been transcribed and 6.5 hours (47 videos)
have been translated into Spanish and/or English. The transcriptions and translations were
completed by researchers and native speakers. Genres represented in the corpus are
principally narratives, conversation, song, and demonstrations of traditional material
culture. The recordings associated with the tokens in this paper were at least partially
annotated in ELAN17 and FLEx.18 The examples come from seven consultants, all adults,
one male and six females, the youngest of whom at the time of this writing are in their late
30s and the oldest in their 80s-90s. All but two of the speakers are related to each other.
Each instance of the SFHT and surrounding context was cut from the source videos
and joined in a single MP4 video file which I refer to as the “token reel”. This video along
11
I suspect that the SFHT was borrowed by Ecuadorian Sign Language and not the other way around (the
gesture being an innovation of a deaf community in Ecuador) due to the fairly recent development and
standardization of Ecuadorian Sign Language in the final decades of the 20th century (Nasevilla 2015). Prior
to this time, most deaf individuals in Ecuador were generally isolated from one another and used their own
systems of homesigns to communicate with their immediate families (Bossano Molina 2019).
12
Floyd’s (2018) data does include a token of the SFHT being used without speech by a speaker of
Ecuadorian Highland Kichwa.
13
https://www.youtube.com/user/iyarinapamba.
14
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjM-OUUVz_h6ohmktY-gW0w.
15
http://quechuarealwords.byu.edu/.
16
https://www.ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A269474.
17
https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan.
18
https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/.
when available. 11
with accompanying audio and ELAN file (contains transcription, translation, and
interlinearized gloss) are available to download and view in an OSF repository (Rice
2020b).19 The token number is displayed in the top left corner of the video and the source
file name and timecode in the source file are indicated in the top right corner of the video.
A spreadsheet containing metadata for each token including annotations and source video
citations is also available in the repository.
The data were collected in two passes, first with a “top-down” approach and then
with a “bottom-up”. First, I conducted a concordance search in the transcriptions for words
and phrases I thought would be associated with the SFHT. 20 Then, for the bottom-up
approach, I followed the analytical procedure outlined by Ladewig and Bressem (2013) in
which I went through all of the videos from start to finish with the sound turned off and
transcription/translation hidden while annotating the gestures in terms of the four cardinal
hand parameters (Kilma & Bellugi 1979; Stokoe 1960): hand shape, orientation,
movement, and position in gesture space. Some videos were annotated for gesture before
being transcribed and translated by a native speaker.
All of the author’s videos were transcribed and translated into Spanish by a native
NPK speaker and documentation collaborator, Bélgica Dagua Toquetón, and reviewed by
the author. English translations were provided by the author—who is a fluent speaker of
Spanish and moderately fluent speaker of NPK—with some consultation from Nuckolls
and Swanson, both non-native fluent speakers and who have been doing linguistic
documentation of NPK for many years. Many of Swanson’s videos already had
transcriptions and Spanish translations carried out by native speakers under his direction.
Nuckolls provided the transcription and translation for token 46 and assisted in the English
translations of the tokens associated with qvz001, qvz020 and jbn_qvz002.
Table 1 provides a summary of the tokens, including token number, speaker name,
file name, timecode in the source video, and timecode in the token reel. Table 1 also
includes the associated speech strings and translations for each token. A more detailed
analysis of selected examples of the co-occurring speech strings and gestures are given in
Section 5, which focuses on the function of the SFHT. All figures and examples are given a
caption which shows the speaker’s first name, recording reference code, time code, and
token number.
Form of the spread-fingered hand torque

This section describes the formal features of the SFHT gesture as it appears in the corpus
using the parameters of handshape, orientation, position in gesture space, and movement. I
19
https://osf.io/2vrj4/.
20
AntConc (Anthony 2020).
when available. 12
show that handshape and especially movement are the most salient features of the gesture
and together they form the kinesic core. Movement (the torque), in particular, is the most
salient element of the gesture. The tables referenced in this section are found in the
Appendix due to their size. A comprehensive table with all tokens and columns together
can be found in the aforementioned OSF repository (A. Rice, 2020).
Movement
The most salient feature of the SFHT is the movement which I call a “torque” because the
palm is rotated in one direction and then back as shown in Figure 3.21 The pair of rotations
is performed fairly rapidly and evokes the image of the movement of a tool such as torque-
wrench or rachet used to tighten or loosen lug-nuts.
Figure 3. The pair of rotations that make up the spread-fingered hand torque.22
Figure 4 shows the phases of a single-handed SFHT and I describe it using McNeill’s
gesture phases (2005: 31). In the preparation phase (a), the speaker moves her right hand
upward from a rest position on the book. The stroke of the SFHT has multiple phases, in (b)
she begins the first phase of the rotation while the palm is oriented down, then in (c) the
palm is now oriented vertically. She continues to rotate the palm until it is oriented upwards
in (d). This 180° rotation is the first of two rotations, the orientation of the palm in (d) is
what I define as the main palm orientation for each token in §4.2. The second phase of the
rotation then begins and the palm rotates in the opposite direction (e) and stops with the
palm now oriented down in a poststroke hold in (f), although not in exactly the same
position as (a), since the palm is tilted up in an almost vertical alignment. Together these
two rotations constitute a single torque.
56% of the single-handed and two-handed SFHT tokens (in which both hands
performed the name number of torques) in the corpus featured only a single torque, 25%
had two torques, and the remaining 19% had three or more with five being the highest
number of torques found in the corpus (N=2). In the remaining two-handed tokens, each
21
Cf. “body torque” (Schegloff 1998; Kamunen 2019) for a similar usage of “torque” albeit in the context of
posture and orientation of the body in conversation and interaction.
22
I am grateful to Alyssa Rice for providing this figure (https://www.instagram.com/allthe_birds/?hl=en).
when available. 13
hand performed a different number of torques, with the right and presumably dominant
hand always performing more. There are four instances in which the left hand did not
complete a whole torque, performing only a single rotation. See Table 2 in the Appendix
for a complete summary of the number of torques for each token. All SFHT tokens were
also annotated for approximate degree of rotation, duration, and direction of rotation. Due
to constraints of space, these data are not given in Table 2 but they are available in the full
data table in the OSF repository referenced above. I briefly describe each of these features
below.
Figure 4. Phases of the SFHT (Token 37, qvz001 8:02, token reel 7:52).
The degree of rotation is very approximate and defined only for the first rotation of a given
torque. 180° is the maximum degree of rotation and ≤45° as the minimum. For all 52
single-handed and two-handed tokens (in which the degree of rotation was the same
between both hands), approximately half (49%) involved 180° rotations, 28% featured 90°
rotations, and 23% only 45° rotations. Curiously, of the two-handed SFHT tokens in which
each hand showed a different degree of rotation (only nine in total), in only two was the
degree of rotation in the dominant hand greater than that of the non-dominant hand. In the
other seven, the degree of rotation was greater in the non-dominant hand, in only one of
those tokens (Token 57) did the dominant hand perform its torque slower than those of the
non-dominant hand. Within this small set of two-handed tokens, there is a hint of an inverse
when available. 14
correlation in which the greater number of torques is associated with a smaller degree of
rotation (for the first rotation), but that relationship does not hold true for the 54 other
single and dual-handed tokens.
Gesture duration is measured in milliseconds. For SFHT tokens with only a single
torque (N=27), the average duration is 630ms. There is no correlation between the number
of torques and the duration of the torque. A single torque may be performed very slowly
and multiple torques fairly quickly. Thus, the speed of the torque is more likely to be
influenced by discourse-pragmatic factors such as affect or speech rate.
Direction of rotation is marked as clockwise (C) or counter-clockwise (CC)
following the outer edge of the hand (pinky side) from the speaker’s perspective. Most
tokens (73%) are rotated clockwise, regardless of the hand involved. The remaining
counter-clockwise tokens do not appear to correlate with another formal or semantic feature
and may also be influenced by discourse-pragmatic factors or personal preference.
Handshape
Handshape is one of the two most salient formal features of the SFHT. Approximately 75%
of the tokens show a flat or somewhat concave palm with the fingers extended and slightly
bent in towards the palm, especially digits four and five. It is fair to say that the hand-
cupping may simply be an effect of the centrifugal force created when performing the
torque, as shown in Figure 5. 21% percent of the tokens showed a mostly flat hand (Figure
6) and only 4% featured a cupped hand or claw shape (Figure 7). A summary of
handshapes and other information for single-handed tokens of the SFHT is given in Table
2.
Figure 5. Teolinda with a typical semi-concave SFHT handshape (Token 55, qvz020
7:45, token reel 11:31).
(2) *************************
mana… mana yacha-ni
NEG NEG know-1
‘I don’t… I don’t know.’
when available. 15
Figure 6. Bélgica with a flat-handed SFHT (Token 7, tds_qvz034 2:45, token reel 1:14).
(3) *************
riku-kpi mana tiya-shka illa-shka
see-SWRF NEG be-PERF lack-PERF
‘Looking, there was nothing there, it was gone.’
Figure 7. Bélgica with a clawed- or cupped-hand SFHT (Token 31, tds_qvz040 30:15,
token reel 7:01).
when available. 16
(4)
a. ashka-ta kachi panga-ta mana yapa
a.lot-ACC salt leaf-ACC NEG a.lot
‘A lot salt leaf, there is not a lot.’
****************
b. kay kachi panga tukuy parti mana tiya-n=chu
this salt leaf every part NEG be-3=NEG
‘This salt leaf is not present everywhere.’
Most of the tokens exhibited made use of only one hand (69%), while only 31% made use
of two. In some instances, one hand is used because the other hand is holding something (as
in Figure 6 and Figure 7) or is otherwise occupied. However there are other instances in
which both hands are free but only one hand is employed to perform the SFHT. Speakers
can switch between using one and two hands for the same gesture, even within the same
speech event. Two-handed instances of the SFHT were annotated for symmetry and
synchrony. If both hands mirror each other in handshape and position in gesture space, the
two-handed SFHT is marked as symmetrical. If they do not match in at least one of those
dimensions, they are marked as asymmetrical. 13 of the 18 two-handed SFHT’s were
symmetrical, as depicted in Figure 8, and six were asymmetrical, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 8. Delicia performing a symmetrical and synchronous two-handed SFHT (Token

44, tds_qvz008 3:13, token reel 9:19).
when available. 17
(5) *****
kallpa-ra-ni manzha-ri-sha mana runa mana tiya-nau-ra ni piwas
run-PST-1 fear-ANTIC-COR NEG people NEG be-3.PL-PST not.even nobody
‘I was terrified and ran, there was nobody there, not a single person.’
A two-handed SFHT is considered synchronous if the two hands perform their respective
torques at the same time and with an equal number of torques. Curiously, all but one of the
two-handed uses of the SFHT (N=18) were performed asynchronously. In 13 of the 18 two-
handed asynchronous SFHT tokens, the dominant hand (right hand for all speakers in this
data set) performs the torque first, followed by the left hand, as shown in Figure 10.
The dominant hand (the right hand for all speakers in this data set) always performs
a greater number of torques. Handshape between the two hands is variable and does not
show a preference for either hand. This is shown in Figure 5, in which the speaker’s right
hand is more active, whereas the SFHT in the left hand is more constrained and exhibited
fewer torques. These examples also show that when both hands are used, they are not
necessarily equally active.
Figure 9. Eulodia performing an asymmetrical and asynchronous two-handed SFHT

(Token 38, tds_qvz038 10:01, token reel 8:02).
(6)
a. ñukanchi tiya-shka-ma ñaupa runa kasi illa-k a-shka-y=ga
1PL be-PERF-DAT before person almost lack-AT be-PERF- LOC=TOP
‘Where we used to live, when there were almost no people there,’
when available. 18
*******
b. yapa puma tiya-g a-g a-ra kasa chaki ruku-guna-y
a.lot jaguar be-AT COP-AT COP-PST like.this foot old-PL-LOC
‘there were a lot jaguars, with big paws like this.’
Figure 10. David’s left hand torques asynchronously following the right hand (Token
57, tds_qvz031 9:38, token reel 11:42).
(7)
a. “ima=shi ri-ra” ni-sha “ña kay=mi miku-shka a-n=ga” ni-shka
what=EV go-PSt say-COR now here=EVS eat-PERF COP-3=TOP say-PERF
‘“Where could they have gone?” he thought, “Everything is eaten here.” He
thought, there was nothing.’
********************
b. illa-n ña ima kaku-was illa-kta miku-shka
lack-3 so what crumb-MIR lack-ADV eat-PERF
‘There was nothing, and even the crumbs were gone, eaten up.’
Orientation and Position

Palm orientation and position in gesture space are variable and I do not regard these
features as particularly salient or stable elements of the SFHT. Palm orientation is
when available. 19
somewhat difficult to define given that the SFHT involves multiple rotations of the palm. I
define the palm orientation as that of the hand in mid-stroke, between phases or excursions,
or after the first rotation and before the second. Palm orientation of the hand prior to the
first rotation is highly variable and depends on what the hand was involved in prior to
performing the SFHT. Looking at the rotation of the palm mid-stroke shows a high degree
of uniformity. 50% of the tokens showed a palm aligned with the vertical axis between
rotations (as shown in Figures Figure 6 and Figure 7), 34% of the tokens had the palm
facing up, and 11% were palm-down. Two of the two-handed SFHT tokens featured a
mixed palm orientation between hands as shown in Figure 9. Palm orientation for single-
handed tokens is given in Table 2.
Like orientation, the position of the hand(s) in gesture space is largely a result of the
speaker’s posture and position in relation to the camera and/or interlocutor. Most tokens
occur in the centre-centre position (34%) or in the left (19%) or right (19%) peripheries of
the centre in McNeill’s elaboration of gesture space (1992: 89). The rest (28%) were in the
more peripheral quadrants and are largely a result of whatever the hand was doing prior to
performing the SFHT. A summary of position in gesture space for singled-handed tokens is
given in Table 2.
Token 33, as shown in Figure 11 for example, is performed in the lower-centre
periphery at waist level, probably due to the fact that it follows a depictive gesture in which
the speaker uses a side-to-side sweeping motion with her body, arms extended and hands at
waist level. She does this because in the story she is telling, a character is searching the
ground for certain objects that are missing. The sweeping gesture, then, is depictive in that
the speaker is modeling the expanse of the flat surface of the ground, taking the character’s
point of view. After completing the sweep, she immediately states that the objects are
missing while performing the SFHT with her hands still at her waist.
when available. 20
Figure 11. Bélgica performing a SFHT after a sweep (Token 33, tds_qvz006 1:17, token
reel 7:15).
(8) ****
pay asua-shka asua ña illa-k
3 chicha.make-PERF chicha now lack-AT
‘Her prepared chicha was now gone’.
Summary
Table 2 provide a partial summary of the variation in handshape, handedness, orientation,
position, and movement (all data are available in the repository). With regard to other
articulators, head shakes sometimes accompany the use of the SFHT (22%), which is
unsurprising given that the gesture is a marker of ABSENCE, a concept with an inherent
negative quality that is widely associated with head shake (McClave 2000). Notably, there
is a complete lack of accompanying shoulder shrugs or eyebrow raises that speakers of
some other languages such as English might use when talking about something that is
absent. The kinesic core of the SFHT gesture appears to reside entirely in the hand.
That there is a great degree of variation in the formal dimensions of this gesture is
not unprecedented. Variation in form is present across all dimensions of language such as
the phonetic variation within different manifestations of the same phoneme or the variation
of a grammatical construction (Gries 2003). With bodily articulators, we can expect the
same, given the large number of possible articulators and their potential range of motion
and position. A gesture’s form may also be influenced by factors such as individual
idiosyncrasies (Mittelberg 2007). Hinnell (2018) notes such variation in gestures associated
with aspect auxiliaries in English. Gawne (2018) also finds variation in a formally similar
when available. 21
rotating palms gesture in Syuba and remarks that only some of which can be attributed to
semantic features. For the SFHT, however, none of the variations appear linked to any
particular semantic features, which are described in the next section.
Despite the variation in the formal dimensions of the gesture, handshape and
movement stand out as the two most salient formal features of the SFHT. Thus, given the
corpus data available at present, I posit the following as the prototypical formal profile of
the SFHT: an open though slightly concave palm with spread fingers that performs at least
one pair of 180° rotations. This then forms the kinesic core of the SFHT.
Semantic function of the spread-fingered hand torque

As described in Section 1, gestures deemed to be recurrent must be comprised of both a
stable kinesic core and a stable semantic core. Section 4 presented the kinesic core of the
SFHT as an open palm with spread fingers performing a torquing motion. In this section, I
argue that the concept of ABSENCE serves as the stable semantic core of the SFHT. Every
instance of the SFHT in the corpus co-occurs with a speech string communicating some
notion of ABSENCE, which can be split into a few types. This section describes the different
types of ABSENCE whose expression the use of the SFHT helps to communicate:
REFERENTIAL ABSENCE, RELATIONAL ABSENCE, and EPISTEMIC ABSENCE.23 The examples
illustrated in this section are given with a still of the gesture being performed. The specific
verbal construction that co-occurs with the SFHT with its gloss and translation are in bold
font.
Referential absence
The first type of absence noted is that of REFERENTIAL ABSENCE , conveying the meaning
that specific concrete entities (referents) such as people, animals, trees, rocks, and
inanimate objects are being predicated as absent. 73% of the SFHT tokens in the corpus
involve REFERENTIAL ABSENCE . Most of the tokens co-occur with two specific
constructions: mana tiyana ‘to not be present’ (mana is the negative particle and tiyana is
the infinitive form of the verb for standing or being present at a specific place and/or time)
and the verb illana ‘to be lacking’. Mana tiyana is the highest frequency verbal
construction in the corpus (32%) co-occuring with the SFHT, followed by illana (22%).
Within the tokens marked as conveying REFERENTIAL ABSENCE, these two expressions
account for 43% and 30% of the tokens, respectively. The use of illana is entirely confined
to the REFERENTIAL ABSENCE category, while one instance of mana tiyana was found with
RELATIONAL ABSENCE expressions. Overall, the two constructions often co-occur with the
SFHT. The SFHT was gestured with 44% of all instances of mana tiyana in the corpus
23
The referential vs relational distinction is partially based on Langacker’s distinction between nominal and
relational predications (1987).
when available. 22
(N=45), and 22% of all instances of illana (N=61). These rates of co-occurrence between
gestures and specific verbal constructions are similar to those found by Zima (2017) and
Schoonjans (2018) for different recurrent gestures in two European languages.
The other verbal constructions present in the corpus with a co-occuring SFHT
gesture have similar semantic properties in that the theme argument predicated to be absent
is prototypically a concrete entity. These verbal constructions include the NPK equivalents
of: ‘to not have’, ‘to not see’, ‘to not find’, ‘to get lost’, etc. See Table 3 for the complete
list.
In (9) and Figure 12, the speaker uses a SFHT that co-occurs with the mana tiyana
construction. She tells a story regarding the spirit of a deceased grandfather who, because
he was not baptized prior to his death, is reincarnated as a deer, although he still has the
ability to appear as a human. He returns to visit his grandchildren and attempts to lure them
out into the forest away from the settlement so that they will get lost and die and thus join
him in death. He does this by telling the children that he has a chagra ‘agricultural
field/agricultural field’ out in the forest that is full of papayas and that they should come
with him to gather the papayas. He repeatedly transforms back into his deer form and
attempts to hide this from the children by occasionally disappearing. The children are left to
search for the agricultural field by themselves, thinking their grandfather has wandered
away or got ahead of them. In (9a) one child asks another “Where is the agricultural field?”
and in (9b) they search for it. Then the speaker acting as narrator simply states in (9c) that
the agricultural field was not there while performing the SFHT. The point is that the
agricultural field is not there because it does not exist and the children have not figured this
out yet. The grandfather’s agricultural field, a physical object of sorts (as a place), is thus
the absent entity in this example.
when available. 23
Figure 12. Bélgica performing a single-handed SFHT (Token 11, tds_qvz036 1:42,
token reel 2:11).
(9)
a. “may-bi=ta chagra”
where-LOC= INT agricultural field
‘“where is the agricultural field?”’
b. “apa yaya papaya chagra-y ni-ra” ni-sha maska-shka

grand father papaya agricultural field -LOC say-PST say-COR search-
PERF
‘“grandfather said it was in a papaya agricultural field” they said, searching.’
******
c. mana tiya-shka
NEG be-PERF
‘it wasn’t there’
Note that the SFHT is slightly offset from the co-occurring mana tiyashka ‘it was not
there’; the stroke starts 189ms before the onset of the phrase. The production of the
construction itself is quiet, almost whispered. This could be because the SFHT does the
discourse legwork of underscoring that the agricultural field was absent, or the reduced
when available. 24
vocal quality of the phrase is meant to highlight the “spookiness” of the situation. Things
that disappear or appear in unexpected places or that do not exist where they should be are
common elements in scary stories told by NPK speakers.
In (10), associated with Figure 13, the speaker hears the call of a hummingbird and
comments that the hummingbird is crying because it cannot find any flowers to feed from
and she, the speaker, empathizes with it. She does this by assuming the perspective of the
hummingbird and says “if there are no flowers, what will I drink?” The researchers then ask
her to pause while they finish setting their camera up. When the camera is ready, they ask
her to repeat what she said. She repeats that the hummingbird is crying and again assumes
the perspective of the hummingbird, but this time she uses the SFHT while saying sisa
illakpi ‘if there are no flowers’ using illana ‘to lack’ to indicate the missing entity
‘flowers’.
Figure 13. Luisa performing a single-handed SFHT (Token 46, jbn_qvz001 0:39, token
reel 9:31).
(10) ********
waka-sha puri-u-k “sisa illa-kpi ima-ta-ta upi-sha” ni-sha
cry-COR travel-DUR-AT flower lack-SWRF what-ACC- INT drink-1.FUT say-COR
‘It goes around crying, “If there are no flowers, what will I drink?” It wonders.’
Although mana tiyana is more frequent in this dataset, illana may be the best candidate for
when available. 25
the citation form of this gesture. When asking NPK speakers what this gesture meant (cf.
Section 2), all of them replied with illana. In my fieldwork, I have informally observed that
when an NPK speaker is asked “Where is (X person)?” a common response is simply illan,
lit. ‘s/he lacks’, accompanied by a performance of the SFHT. Table 3 gives a complete list
of the verbal constructions associated with what I am calling REFERENTIAL ABSENCE.
Relational absence
The second category of absence observed in the corpus is that of RELATIONAL ABSENCE,
meaning the absence of events, actions, values, and propositions involving entities, rather
than the predication of a missing entity per se. The verbal constructions that co-occur with
the SFHT in this category are defined not solely by their non-concreteness or lack of
reference to specific entities at all, but also by their expressions of meaning relations
between entities. The category is much less frequent than that of REFERENTIAL ABSENCE in
the dataset, as only 22% of the tokens are marked as relational. The constructions in this
category are unique, in that they are not repeated elsewhere in the data and no fixed or
recurring expressions predominate, with one exception of an instance of mana tiyana being
used with a non-concrete entity (Token 36). What I regard as RELATIONAL ABSENCE signals
the actual or potential absence of an ability, the absence of a quality, or the wholesale
absence of an event. Typical co-gesture expressions equate to English counterparts such as:
‘to not realize’, ‘to not be able to’, ‘to not have worth’, ‘to become silent’, ‘to err’.
In (11) and its description in Figure 14, the speaker is telling a story in which a
soldier is wandering alone in the rainforest and encounters a powerful tree spirit in the form
of a man. Afraid, the soldier draws his firearm to shoot at the spirit, but the gun misfires.
The spirit causes the soldier to pass out and then speaks to him in a dream. The soldier is
later found by other soldiers from his detachment and they revive him. His commanding
officer assumes he got drunk and passed out in the forest and the soldier explains what
happened in an attempt to defend himself from the accusation. The commanding officer
asks him to validate his story by firing the weapon again to see if it fails (11a). The soldier
explains that he tried to shoot the man he encountered (11b), but the weapon did not fire
(11c). In (11c) the speaker performs the SFHT while saying mana tugyarachu ‘it did not
erupt’. The absent entity in this example is an event, the eruption or mini-explosion that
occurs when the primer ignites the gunpowder in the cartridge.
when available. 26
Figure 14. David performs a two-handed SFHT (Token 58, tds_qvz033 5:24, token reel
11:52).
(11)
a. “illapa-y-chi-y” ni-shka “aver tugya-nga=chu” ni-sha
shoot-IMP-CAUS- IMP say-PERF to.see erupt-FUT=Q say-COR
‘“Fire!” he said, “let’s see if (the gun) will go off” he was saying.’
b. “ña chasna chi runa-ta=ga ñuka taka-ra-ni” ni-sha

now like.that that person-ACC=TOP 1SG strike-PST-1 say-COR
‘“I tried to shoot that man” he said.’
*************
c. “mana tugya-ra=chu” ni-sha
NEG erupt-PST=NEG say-COR
‘“(But) the (the gun) didn’t go off” he was saying.’
In the following example, presented in (12) and illustrated in Figure 15, the speaker is
describing the promiscuous nature of toucans (various taxa of Ramphastitidae) based on
stories her father used to tell her. She attributes this reputation to the fact that if one of a
pair of toucans, male or female, is killed, it will acquire a new mate within the same day,
implying that toucans are not especially committed to their partners. In lines (12a) and
(12b), a recently widowed female toucan immediately attempts to attract another mate by
when available. 27
perching in a tree and singing until a male toucan arrives. The female then stops singing,
triggering the SFHT, because it has acquired a new mate, as described in (12c). In (12d),
she restates the point of the discussion, which is that the toucan has grown silent because
she has gotten a new mate so quickly after her previous one died.
Figure 15. Eulodia performs a two-handed SFHT (Token 43, tds_qvz021 1:06, token
reel 9:07).
(12)
a. sikwanga=ga mana unay pay=ga awa awa-y tiya-ri-sha
toucan=TOP NEG long.time 3=TOP up up-LOC be-ANTIC- COR
‘The toucan will be perched up there for only a short time.’
b. hahahahahahahahahaaa ña kunga-s chaki-ri-n chiga

IDEO.toucan.call then neck-ADD dry-ANTIC-3 so
‘Hahahahahahahahahaa (it calls) until its throat is dry.’
*****
c. shuk=ga pupupupupu chiga chun tuku-n
one=TOP IDEO.wing.beats then IDEO.silence become-3
‘Another one (flys in) pupupupupu and then chun! It becomes silent.’
d. ña hapi pasa-n shuk-ta

then catch pass-3 one-ACC
‘It has already gotten another one (mate).’
The speaker performs the SFHT in (12c) which co-occurs with tukun ‘it becomes/it
when available. 28
happens’. Key to understanding the context of the use of the SFHT in this example is the
ideophone chun ‘sudden silence’ and the preceding manual gestures. First, she evokes the
image of the male toucan’s arrival by raising her right hand overhead and forming a loose
open hand with the palm oriented downwards, and draws it down over her face towards her
centre. At the same time, she uses the pu ideophone multiple times to evoke the sound of
the incoming toucan’s wings beating the air (Nuckolls 2020b). She then uses the ideophone
chun which signifies a sudden absence of sound (Nuckolls & Swanson 2020) and
simultaneously extends both hands (now flat) to the upper left and right peripheries in an
explosive expanding movement.
The SFHT complements the explosive gesture associated with the ideophone chun,
to give a visual depiction of the sudden silence. The explosive gesture depicts the
suddenness and the SFHT the absence. It is the sound and energy of the incoming toucan
that is now absent. This is mirrored in the vocal-aural modality by chun tukun (lit. ‘it
becomes a sudden absence of sound’). Tukuna ‘to become’ in and of itself would not be a
verb expected to occur with the SFHT. It is only when used with the ideophone, chun, that
its association with the gesture makes sense in this context. Thus, the absence in this
example involves a change of state: the sudden silence after the noisy inbound flight of the
male toucan.
The next example, represented by (13) and Figure 16, shows an absence of value.
The speaker is asked several questions about a plant called simayuka (Psychotria
cenepensis, a species of Rubiaceae with medicinal properties). She comments that this
specific simayuka, which has been planted next to a path, would be better off in a more
remote location where fewer people would be able to see it. In line (13a), she uses the
construction mana valin ‘it does not have value’. This is a direct borrowing of the Spanish
no vale (mentioned previously in Section 2) and has the same meaning: an entity or
proposition being broken, worthless, invalid, or of no use. The speaker uses this in
reference to the location where the simayuka is currently planted. In (13a), she says it is not
good to have the simayuka in this particular spot and in (13b) she explains why (so other
people cannot find it). What is absent, then, is the “value” of having planted the simayuka
in its present location.
Note that the SFHT is not actually performed at the same time the speaker produces
the mana valin construction, but 1576ms afterwards in the following line, (13b), about why
it is not good to have the simayuka in that particular spot. I maintain that the SFHT is
anchored to the mana valin construction, despite not co-occurring with it temporally.
Kendon (2004: 179) observed a similar instance in a Neapolitan speaker and posits that
performing a gesture after the associated speech string “preserves the idea” of the speech
string and contributes to its prominence. I apply Kendon’s reasoning to this example as
well. Clara performs the gesture after mana valin for the discourse-pragmatic reason of
when available. 29
making her judgement of the proposition more prominent to her interlocuter (that it was a
bad idea to plant the simayuka in this particular spot).
Figure 16. Clara performing a one-handed SFHT (Token 54, tds_qvz007 1:29, token
reel 11:13).
(13)
a. tarpu-ngawa mana kay-bi mana vali-n
plant-PURP NEG here-LOC NEG have.value-3
‘It’s no good to plant it here.’
b. ****************
kay runa yapa riku-n pay escondido pay chari-na m=a-n
this people very see-3 3 hidden 3 have-INF EV.S=be-3
‘Here it is very visible to people, it should be kept hidden.’
Epistemic absence
A small number of the tokens (two) have a distinct epistemic quality. EPISTEMIC ABSENCE
involves the absence of knowledge. I draw the label partially from Cooperrider et al. (2018)
who posit a ‘palm-up epistemic’ gesture as being one of two macro gesture groups that
make up the palm-up family of gestures. They state that the semantic core of the palm-up
epistemic gesture is ABSENCE , specifically: ABSENCE OF KNOWLEDGE, ABILITY, or
CONCERN.24 This core, in turn, has a number of extensions that draw upon the same
24
In fact, they state that such palm-up gestures do not widely appear to convey an absence of entities,
substances, or qualities, such as ‘there is none’ outside of children’s gesture (Cooperrider, Abner & Goldin-
when available. 30
meaning such as INTERROGATIVES, EXCLAMATIVES, HYPOTHETICALS, and expressions of

UNCERTAINTY and OBVIOUSNESS . The two epistemic uses of the SFHT in the corpus
correspond most closely up with Cooperrider and colleagues’ subcategory of
UNCERTAINTY.
The two epistemic SFHT tokens are anchored to the same verbal construction, as
expressed in (14) and depicted in Figure 17. The speaker was asked to recount the
traditional Bible story of Adam and Eve and follow-up questions were then posed to her by
her interlocutor. She is asked what the forbidden fruit in the story looked like. After some
hesitation she states that she does not know and performs the SFHT twice, as shown in
(14a). What is absent is her knowledge about the appearance of the fruit. In (14b), she
follows up by stating that she only knows that it is said to be fruit.
The SFHT is performed concurrently with the first false-start mana in (14a) and
extends through its repetition and the rest of phrase and is then performed again with the
negative particle, mmhmm. The first two torques of the first SFHT (token 55) co-occur with
the first lengthened mana and the pause between both instances of mana. The third torque
starts with the second mana and is performed much faster, perhaps indicating that she is
now a little more certain about her uncertainty.
The token in (14) co-occurs with the negative particle, which I take to be a case
similar to that of (13) in which the gesture is more anchored to the highly frequent
expression mana yachani ‘I don’t know’ despite co-occurring temporally with just the
negative particle. This was the only instance in the corpus of the SFHT temporally co-
occurring with a bare negative such as mmhmm, ‘nope’. Thus, I rule out the possibility of
the gesture being a general marker of negation. It is restricted to instances of negation only
in the context of ABSENCE, such as ABSENCE OF KNOWLEDGE.
Meadow 2018: 4, 10). Given the present data, ‘absence of entities’ is exactly what the SFHT in NPK does.
The question is whether the SFHT can be said to be a palm-up gesture due to the fluid nature of the palm
orientation before, during, or after the torque.
when available. 31
Figure 17. Teolinda performing a two-handed SFHT (Tokens 55-56, qvz020 7:45, 7:48,
token reel 11:31, 11:34).
(14) ********************* ********
a. a… mmmana… mana yacha-ni mmhmm
PRT NEG NEG know-1 nope
‘um… I don’t… I don’t know, nope.’
b. yanga shuk muyu ni-shka=lla-ta

only one fruit say-PERF=LIM-ACC
‘it is only called a fruit.’
Instances of the EPISTEMIC ABSENCE SFHT in the corpus are few, which is likely because
the corpus is largely composed of narrative texts and not a lot of spontaneous
conversational data. Estimating the exact portion of narrative vs. conversation is difficult
because the conversation that does occur in the corpus is interspersed in the various
narratives or involves examples of reported speech. Typically, conversational speech occurs
when someone like a researcher asks the speaker to clarify something in the narrative.
Nevertheless, these two instances of EPISTEMIC ABSENCE associated with a SFHT all
occurred in a conversational register. We might then expect to see a better representation of
epistemic SFHT tokens in a corpus with more conversation. Discourse register for each
token is given in the full data table in the repository.
Summary
Table 3 in the Appendix lists the speech strings and their English translations for each
token and spells out specifically what is absent in each example. As with the kinesic form
when available. 32
of the gesture, there is variation in the verbal constructions that co-occur with it although
they are all clearly some manifestation of ABSENCE. I have divided this absence into three
categories and substantiated each with relevant examples: REFERENTIAL ABSENCE (entities),
RELATIONAL ABSENCE (events and qualities), and EPISTEMIC ABSENCE (knowledge).
ABSENCE then, is the semantic core of the recurrent gesture that is the SFHT.
Discussion
In this section, I question why the specific form of the gesture might be associated with
ABSENCE , drawing upon one of the core tenets of cognitive linguistics: that form and
meaning are inseparable or, in other words, form is not arbitrary. I asked several
Ecuadorians, both NPK and Ecuadorian Spanish speakers, whom I know personally why
this gesture seems to be associated with ABSENCE. All of them had the same answer, saying
that it means ‘showing that the hand is empty’. Unlike more conventionalized gestures such
as emblems, recurrent gestures are more transparent in that the link between the meaning
and form is semi-iconic and can be partially deconstructed or analyzed by speakers.
Furthermore, the meaning of a recurrent gesture is generally regarded as deriving from its
form (Ladewig 2014: 1560). Several gesture studies make an effort to tie the use of
pragmatic gestures to more iconic or depictive gestures or actions (Müller 2014) or more
‘concrete representative gestures’, in the words of Kendon (2004: pt. 360). For instance,
Cooperrider and Nuñez (2012: 122–123) posit a stylized form of squinting as the iconic
root of a nose pointing gesture for speakers of Yupno. Gawne (2018: 61) suggests that the
rotated-palms gesture of Syuba speakers comes from “revealing” the hands as a means to
indicate that the speaker declines to engage in an action.
Working from the assumption that the SFHT ‘shows that the hand is empty’, I
believe the iconic root of the SFHT may be something like the display of a palm-up open
hand (PUOH) gesture to indicate that some entity is absent by virtue of there being nothing
in the open hand. NPK speakers also use the PUOH with expressions of absence, as shown
in (16) and the accompanying stills shown in Figure 18. If the hand is inactive and resting
in the lap or hanging by the waist, the hand must be rotated to present the palm as up. I
posit that this rotation movement became part of the kinesic core of the gesture as it became
conventionalized into a pragmatic gesture. The additional rotation that makes for the torque
may have been included as the gesture became more pragmatic and less iconic. In addition,
the movement itself became a more salient feature of the kinesic core while the orientation
of the palm became less so. The often rapid movement also serves the additional pragmatic
function of drawing attention to the hand and its emptiness.
when available. 33
Figure 18. Bélgica performing two different palm-up gestures with expressions of
absence (Swanson 2016a), 1:54.
(16) (a)*************
a. “apa yaya pero mana tiya-n=chu chagra=ga” ni-shka
grand father but NEG be-3=NEG agricultural.field=TOP say-PERF
‘“But grandfather, the agricultural field is not there.” He said.’
(b)******
b. “illa-n=mi” ni-shka
lack-3=EVS say-PERF
‘“It lacks” he said.’
To substantiate that the SFHT “shows emptiness”, I follow the precedent of motivating a
semantic core of a recurrent gesture in terms of an image schema (Cienki 1998; Mittelberg
2010). Mark Johnson defines an image schema as “a recurring, dynamic pattern of our
perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our
experience” (Johnson 1987: xiv). This line of reasoning assumes that human cognition is
essentially embodied and is based on how the human body perceives and interacts with the
physical world. In other words, image schemata are the source of metaphor.
To illustrate, the cyclic gesture, a recurrent gesture used by German speakers
(Ladewig 2011), features a continuous, outward, and circular motion of the hand or one or
more fingers. The gesture is used in contexts of a speaker internally searching for word or
concept (akin to ‘stalling’, ‘buffering’, or ‘loading’), describing ongoing processes,
requests, and enumeration. Ladewig posits CYCLIC CONTINUITY as the semantic core of this
gesture and motivates this with the CYCLE image schema which is a ‘temporal circle’ that
begins in one state, proceeds through a sequence of temporally related events and returns to
when available. 34
the initial state (Johnson 1987: 119–121). A speaker trying to recall a word ‘on the tip of
their tongue’ may cycle their hand through the air, a manifestation of the MIND-IS-A-
MACHINE metaphor which invokes the use of the CYCLE image schema.
The SFHT utilizes fairly quick torquing motion of one or two hands and is always
performed in contexts of talking about absent things. From those contexts I posited
ABSENCE as the semantic core of the SFHT. Here I suggest the CONTAINER image schema
serves as the cognitive basis of the SFHT. The CONTAINER schema is one of the more basic
image schemata in the literature and is defined as a boundary distinguishing an interior
from an exterior, an “in” and an “out” (Lakoff 1987: 271–272). The human body itself, for
example, is a container (Johnson 1987: 21), it distinguishes between space outside of the
body and space inside of the body and substances such as air frequently cross this boundary
by going into (breathing in) and coming out (breathing out) of the body. Houses, buildings,
locations, and territories are also containers that we move in and out of. The CONTAINER
schema also underlies many of our basic metaphors in more abstract expressions. In
English, for example, a coach may tell an unfocused or underperforming athlete to get your
head in the game. “The game” is the abstract container in which the athlete is currently not
present due to their unsatisfactory performance or lack of focus. To cross the boundary of
“the game” and move inside of it, the athlete must focus or improve their performance.
Someone who loses their job becomes out of work, “work” being the metaphorical
container in which someone is inside if they have employment, outside if they do not. In
Ecuadorian Spanish one might say someone is como un camarón en caldo de pata. lit. ‘like
a shrimp in a cow-foot soup’, which is to say that one is in a place or situation they do not
typically belong to, as shellfish do not typically appear in Ecuadorian cow-foot soup. The
cow-foot soup, caldo de pata, is the container in this metaphor.
The CONTAINER image schema is at work in NPK as well, in (1) the speaker says
that there was salt at the village, “the village” being the container in which salt is not
present. The fact that the salt is absent, is emphasized by use of the SFHT. I believe that the
CONTAINER image schema also contributes to the cognitive basis of the SFHT since the
metaphor at work here is HAND-IS-A-CONTAINER and to show an empty hand as in Figure 19
is to show an empty container. Doing so while speaking about something being absent from
a container, whether concrete or abstract, underscores that thing’s absence.
In response to my question about why the SFHT means that something is absent, an
Ecuadorian Spanish speaker illustrated her answer by holding a mixing bowl out in front of
her, rotated it 90° until the top of the bowl was facing her, and placed her free hand inside it
and performed a slow SFHT. She said that if the bowl had something in it, she would not
be able to move her hand. The hand in the SFHT, then, is the space within the container,
not necessarily the boundaries of the container. Assuming that something like a PUOH is
the iconic root of this gesture (as in Figure 19), just as the palm orientation became less
when available. 35
salient while the movement became more salient, the metaphor of the hand being a
container eroded while the movement depicting the emptiness “inside” took centre stage.
Thus, despite drawing on the HAND-IS-A- CONTAINER metaphor, the torquing motion
represents the empty space inside the metaphorical container and may have schematized to
represent emptiness or absence more generally, whether of a thing, a relation, or
knowledge.
Conclusion
In this paper, I describe a gesture that I call the spread-fingered hand torque (SFHT) and
analyze it as a recurrent gesture because of the stability of its pairing of a small range of
forms and a small set of meanings (Ladewig 2014). The SFHT indicates ABSENCE in
pragmatic contexts for speakers of Northern Pastaza Kichwa (NPK). To arrive at this
conclusion, I used a form-first methodological approach (Müller 2017: 279) in which the 61
tokens of the SFHT were identified by their form in a documentary video corpus of
approximately nine hours of narratives (and some conversation). I then accounted for the
spoken expressions that accompanied these gestures and analyzed them semantically.
Despite the variation in the form of the tokens (such as the number of hands used, speed, or
number of iterations) there are two consistent parameters: the handshape—a flat or slightly
concave palm with spread fingers––and the movement—a torquing motion in which the
palm rotates in one direction and then back. This constitutes the formational or kinesic core
of the SFHT. While it is somewhat difficult to predict the pragmatic context of use, every
instance of the SFHT in the corpus occurred with expressions of or intentions about
ABSENCE , a generalized concept which constitutes the semantic core of this gesture.
Müller suggests that the meaning of recurrent gestures is grounded in embodied
motivations (Müller 2017: 277). In Section 6, I discuss how the meaning at the heart of the
SFHT, ABSENCE , is linked to the form of the SFHT in terms of metaphorically depicting an
empty CONTAINER image schema with the hand(s). I also suggest that the torquing motion
may represent emptiness as well as serving a pragmatic function by drawing attention to the
gesture.
The SFHT is also reported to be widely used with the same meaning of ABSENCE for
other languages in Ecuador, including Ecuadorian Spanish, Ecuadorian Sign Language,
Achuar-Shiwiar, and Wao Tedeo. The SFHT potentially has status as an emblematic
gesture, but the dataset used for this study can only substantiate the SFHT as a recurrent co-
speech gesture for NPK. There is some indication that the semantic core of the SFHT may
be in the process of being replaced (in Ecuadorian Spanish at least) by that of the
kinesically similar comme ci comme ça gesture which indicates INDIFFERENCE or
UNCERTAINTY.
when available. 36
There are many questions that remain to be answered regarding the SFHT, such as
additional contextual factors in which a speaker may choose to use the SFHT or not (or a
different gesture like the PUOH) when talking about ABSENCE . It is also important to
examine the use of the SFHT in Ecuador at large. Creating and examining a large audio-
visual corpus of Ecuadorian Spanish should not be too difficult. Examination of the SFHT
in other Ecuadorian Indigenous languages and Ecuadorian Sign Language would be
especially insightful.
I also follow other researchers in calling for incorporation of multimodal analysis in
language documentation. As mentioned in Section 2, both fields have much to gain from
this integration. Language documentation in particular stands to benefit from multimodal
analysis and cognitive linguistics approaches in general which put a premium on actual
usage rather than on lists of vocabulary or more formal aspects of language.
Methodological practice in language documentation has long been constrained by the
nature of the data collected: largely elicited and therefore highly decontextualized samples
of speech that eventually get analyzed chiefly for morphological or propositional content or
paradigmatic contrast with other forms. By putting a greater premium on spontaneous
samples of connected discourse in an interactional setting, unconstrained by elicitation and
recorded using audio-visual means, the quality of the data deepens to include aspects of
narrative structure, speaker stance, interactional cues, co-speech behaviors, pragmatic
effects, among other often-overlooked phenomena of natural language use. By expanding
the data collection methods as well as the analyses, aspects of Indigenous minority
languages that would otherwise remain invisible can emerge (Shapero 2014; Rice 2014).
This inclusion is also time-sensitive, as language documentation and description is itself an
urgent undertaking, as the world races against the clock of language loss. As speakers of
Indigenous minority languages assimilate to majority national languages, they may lose
part of the multimodal signal, as well as knowledge of other unique phenomena like
specialized vocabulary, ideophones, metaphors, and other conceptual strategies (Rice 2012;
Nuckolls 1996: 134).
Finally, multimodal approaches and their inclusion within contemporary language
documentation practice are more useful and engaging to speakers or learners of Indigenous
minority languages. Speakers and learners are often indifferent to previous generations of
linguists who have focused on theoretically relevant aspects of language which too often
have yielded abstract analyses of little to no descriptive or pedagogical value (Rice 2017).
As speakers of standardized national languages, we tend to conceive of language in much
the same way: as lists or systems of abstract forms that can exist independently of context
and usage and be easily rendered as text in print. This idealization of language as text is
rarely apparent for many speakers of largely oral Indigenous minority languages.
In my experience, speakers of NPK have little interest in the usual textual outputs of
when available. 37
documentation projects, including more pedagogically friendly materials such as

dictionaries or story books. Instead, they are far more interested in visual materials, such as
videos of elders telling stories and demonstrations of traditional material culture. Recently,
many researchers have made effective use of video in engaging Indigenous minority
language communities as part of their documentation projects (Grzech 2017; Lovestrand
2017; Gholami 2018; Bermúdez A. & Uzendoski 2018).
Additionally, this view of language as something that is textual and can exist
independent of context and usage may be at odds with how speakers of minority languages
think about language itself. NPK and other Kichwa speakers, for example, appear to
conceive of language as something more interactional, evidenced by their professed ideal of
ali rimana ‘to speak well’. Ali rimana involves speaking relationally and with an
appropriate perspective, it is “considered empowering because it forges bonds of
interconnectedness with others” (Nuckolls & Swanson 2018: 14). Speaking in relation to
others is one of the qualities of those who are sindzhi ‘strong’, while those who do not are
liars or simply killa ‘useless’ (Ibid, p.14). Approaching language in this manner, as
something interactional and usage based, dovetails with the aims of cognitive linguistics in
representing the full spectrum of language use and meaning (Rice 2017: 58). Let us
continue to embrace multimodal data and be sindzhi linguists.
when available. 38
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Accepted in 2021 for publication in Gesture. Please cite published version when
available. 47
Appendix
Table 1. Summary of token metadata

Token video ID Speaker Source video Token reel Citation/collector
timecode timecode
1 qvz007 Bélgica 5:45 0:04 (A. Rice & Dagua
Toquetón, 2019)
2 qvz026 1:14 0:20 (A. Rice & Dagua
Toquetón, 2019a)
3 1:15 0:21
4 1:24 0:29
5 tds_qvz034 2:19 0:46 Tod D. Swanson
6 2:20 0:47
7 2:45 1:13
8 3:04 1:31
9 4:00 1:43
10 tds_qvz036 0:13 1:57
11 1:42 2:11
12 4:50 2:28
13 4:52 2:29
14 tds_qvz037 1:03 2:39
15 3:27 2:49
16 6:00 3:15
17 6:12 3:27
18 9:41 3:38
19 9:42 3:39
20 11:15 3:55
21 14:32 4:21
22 16:59 4:38
23 17:15 4:53
24 19:02 5:24
25 tds_qvz038 4:35 5:38
26 4:52 5:54
27 5:24 6:27
28 tds_qvz040 12:46 6:33
29 28:06 6:55
30 30:14 7:00
31 30:15 7:01
32 tds_qvz006 1:14 7:12 (Swanson 2016b)
available. 48
33 1:17 7:15
34 2:00 7:24
35 2:07 7:29
36 tds_qvz027 1:46 7:41 (Swanson 2016c)
37 qvz001 Eulodia 8:02 7:52 (A. Rice, Dagua
Toquetón, & Dagua
Toquetón, 2019)
38 tds_qvz038 10:01 8:02 Tod D. Swanson
39 19:31 8:21
40 21:48 8:41
41 34:07 8:48
42 34:14 8:55
43 tds_qvz021 1:06 9:07 (Swanson 2016d)
44 tds_qvz008 Delicia 3:13 9:19 (Swanson 2016e)
45 tds_qvz028 8:01 9:26 (Swanson 2020)
46 jbn_qvz001 Luisa 0:39 9:31 (Nuckolls 2020c)
47 jbn_qvz002 0:35 9:43 (Nuckolls 2020d)
48 0:43 9:52
49 2:41 10:08
50 10:52 10:28
51 11:21 10:38
52 11:25 10:43
53 tds_qvz029 0:52 10:50 (Swanson 2017a)
54 tds_qvz007 Clara 1:29 11:13
55 qvz020 Teolinda 7:45 11:31 (A. Rice, Dagua
Toquetón, & Dagua
Toquetón, 2019b)
56 7:48 11:34
57 tds_qvz031 David 9:38 11:42 Tod D. Swanson
58 tds_qvz033 5:24 11:52
59 tds_qvz041 Eulodia 0:29 11:57 (Swanson 2017b)
60 0:31 11:59
61 0:34 12:02
available. 49
Table 2. Summary of kinesic features for each token

Token Duration Hands (A)Sym- (A)Synchron Position Palm Handshape Torques
(ms) metry ization orientation
1 1406 1L N/A N/A centre-left PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
2 734 2 asym asynch centre- VP L: sp, bent 4-5 on twist, R: RH: 3,
centre sp LH: 2
3 771 2 asym asynch centre- VP L: sp, bent 4-5 on twist, R: RH: 3,
centre sp LH: 2
4 720 2 asym asynch centre- PD L: sp5, 4-5 curl on twist R: RH: 3,
centre sp5 LH: 2
5 276 1R N/A N/A centre- VP sp5, bent 5 on twist 1
right
6 2515 1R N/A N/A centre- VP sp 5
right
right
8 355 1R N/A N/A centre- VP sp5, bent 5 on twist 1
right
9 464 1R N/A N/A centre- PU sp5, bent 4-5 on twist 2
right
10 498 1R N/A N/A centre- VP sp5, slightly bent 5 on 2
centre twist
11 266 1R N/A N/A centre- PU sp5, bent 5 on twist 1
right
centre
13 334 1R N/A N/A centre- PU sp 1
centre
right
15 333 1R N/A N/A centre- VP sp, bent 5 on twist 2
centre
16 2448 1L N/A N/A centre-left VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist 3
18 800 1L N/A N/A centre-left PD sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
19 636 1L N/A N/A lower-left PD sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
21 687 1L N/A N/A centre- VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
centre
right
23 989 1L N/A N/A centre- PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
centre
26 631 2 sym asynch lower- PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
center
27 718 2 sym asynch lower- PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist R: 1, L: 1
centre
28 640 1L N/A N/A centre-left PD sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
29 500 1R N/A N/A centre- VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist 2
right
30 373 1R N/A N/A upper VP claw 2
available. 50
centre-
right
31 1046 1R N/A N/A centre- VP claw 3
centre
32 552 1R N/A N/A lower- VP sp 1
centre
33 567 2 sym asynch lower- VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist R: 1, L:
centre 0.5
34 401 2 sym asynch lower- VP sp 1
centre
35 1044 1R N/A N/A centre- PU sp, bent 5 on twist 1
centre
36 597 2 sym asynch upper- VP sp, bent 5 on twist RH: 3,
centre LH: 2
37 1187 1R N/A N/A centre- PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
right
38 1183 2 asym asynch upper- R: PU, L: R: sp bent 4-5 on twist, L: R: 2, L: 1
centre PD sp bent 4-5 on twist
39 403 1R N/A N/A upper- VP sp, bent 5 on twist 1
centre
40 300 1R N/A N/A centre- PD sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
right
centre
centre
43 565 2 asym asynch upper- PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
centre
44 783 2 sym synch centre- PU L: sp, R: sp, bent 4-5 on 1
centre twist
45 1062 2 sym asynch upper- VP L: sp, R: sp, bent 5 on 3
centre twist
46 534 1R N/A N/A upper- PU sp 1
centre
47 1037 1L N/A N/A upper- VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist 3
centre
49 1116 1L N/A N/A upper-left PD sp, bent 4-5 on twist 5
50 565 1L N/A N/A centre-left VP sp, bent 5 on twist 2
51 701 1L N/A N/A centre-left VP sp 2
52 628 1L N/A N/A centre-left PU sp 1
53 501 2 sym asynch upper- VP sp RH: 3,
centre LH: 2
right
55 3306 2 sym asynch centre- PU R: claw, L: sp, bent 4-5 on RH: 3,
centre twist LH: 2
56 698 1R N/A N/A centre- PU claw 1
centre
57 1042 2 sym asynch centre- PD sp, bent 4-5 on twist RH: 2,
centre LH: 2
58 434 2 asym asynch centre- R: PU, L: sp, bent 4-5 on twist RH: 1,
centre PD LH: 0.5
59 868 2 sym asynch centre- VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist RH: 1,
centre LH: 0.5
60 606 2 sym asynch centre- PU sp, bent 4-5 on twist RH: 1,
available. 51
centre LH: 0.5

61 801 2 sym asynch centre- VP sp, bent 4-5 on twist 1
centre
available. 52
Table 3. Transcriptions, translations, and semantic information for each token

Token Transcription Token reel Key phrase translation Absent entity Static / Type of
timecode dynamic absence
1 mana tiyanchu there are no mana tiyana to not be people static referential
runaga people present
2 mana tiyashkay there were no mana tiyana to not be people static referential
sikamushkauna people that had present
come up river
3 mana tiyashkay there were no mana tiyana to not be people static referential
sikamushkauna people that had present
come up river
4 chushak it was empty, chushak / empty / to people/human static referential
chushak ña empty, there were mana tiyana not be habitation
runas mana no people there present
tiyashkay
5 mana imatas he hadn't found mana tupana to not find wild game static referential
tupashka anything in the
sachaybi forest
6 kay aychata not finding any mana tupana to not find wild game static referential
mana tupasha game, he was sad
llakirisha and returned
shamushka (home)
7 rikukpi mana looking, there is mana tiyana to not be agouti (source static referential
tiyashka nothing, (the present of sound)
illashka source of the
sound) lacks
8 mana tiyashka there was nothing mana tiyana to not be agouti snake static referential
present (source of
sound)
9 pero mana but we didn't have mana to not have camera phone static referential
charisha (a mobile phone) charina
10 ña rik ashkauna (the parents) rina to go parents dynamic referential
illak having gone
11 mana tiyashka (the agricultural mana tiyana to not be papaya dynamic referential
field) was not present agricultural
there field
12 taruga there was only papayawalla just papayas domestic static referential
papayawalla deer papaya papaya
tiyashkara
13 mana tiyashka (the normal mana tiyana to not be domestic static referential
chara papayas) were not present papaya
there
14 payguna the kids would illana to be lacking mothers dynamic referential
sapalla sakirik usually be alone
ashkauna at home when the
wasipi parents were
wawaguna lacking
mamaguna
illakpi
15 mana chara it wasn't there, the mana to not knowing that static relational
chibi child did not musiyana realize grandpa was a
musiyaushkach realize it deer
u wawa
16 rikukpi looking, he sees mana tiyana to not be agricultural static referential
chakraga an empty field, present field
pakllaka mana there's nothing
tyian there
available. 53
17 mana (the agricultural mana tiyana to not be agricultural static referential

tiyashkaya field) wasn't there present field
18 mana chagras “there's no mana tiyana to not be agricultural static referential
tiyarachu apa agricultural field present field
yaya grandfather”
19 illarami "it's missing" he illana to be lacking agricultural static referential
nishkaya said field
20 mana tiyana "there wasn't even mana tiyana to not be manioc static referential
any manioc" he present
said
21 "may karuypi "he probably took mana to not return child dynamic referential
ichuk rina him really far bultiana
ashka wawa away and left him
mana so that the child
bultiamuchun" won't return" they
nisha said
22 rikurikka seeing (that the chingarina / to get lost / grandfather dynamic referential
chingarin child has been anchurina to disappear
anchurin treated by a
shaman), he
disappears and is
gone
23 ichugrikpi he left him there chingarina to get lost child dynamic referential
wawa chingarin so that the child
mara sachaypi would get lost in
the forest
24 pandasha pay erring until (they pandasha making children static relational
raykaywan ña get lost) they die pay errors, he
wañuchun raykaywan being with
hunger
25 amu illak man (the deer) is illana to be lacking spirit owner static referential
without a spirit
owner
26 amu mana there is no spirit mana tiyana to not be spirit owner static referential
tiyanchu owner present
27 amus illak asha and because it is illana to be lacking spirit owners static referential
chasna asha the case that they
tarugaga mas do not have spirit
yapakta owners, there are
too many deer
28 kanda if they talk with mana to not conversation static relational
kuintawkpita you, you'll know, kuintana converse
yachangi mana if one doesn't talk,
kuintakpi mana one doesn't know
yachayba chaun
29 chi kay kachi the salt leaf, mana tiyana to not be salt leaf static referential
panga mana ali there's not a lot of present
baratu mays it wherever you
tiyanzhu go
30 ashkata kachi there is not a lot mana yapa not a lot salt leaf static referential
pangata mana of salt leaf
yapa
31 kay kachi panga the salt leaf is not mana tiyana to not be salt leaf static referential
tukuy parti everywhere present
mana tiyanzhu
32 illan... chi it's gone, that illana to be lacking chicha dynamic referential
asuara pagarik morning chicha, it
ashka was
available. 54
33 pay asuashka her chicha was illana to be lacking chicha dynamic referential
asua ña illak now missing
34 mana tiyashka it wasn't there mana tiyana to not be chicha dynamic referential
present
35 runaga mana there were no mana tiyana to not be people static referential
tiyak ashka people there present
36 mana tiyanzhu it's not there like mana tiyana to not be conversation, dynamic relational
chansna that present dancing,
drinking
(sociability)
37 ña kachi mana and there was no mana tiyana to not be salt static referential
tiyag ashkay salt here in the present
kay llaktata village
38 ñukanchi where we lived illana to be lacking people static referential
tiyashkama before there were
ñawpa mana almost no people
runa casi illak there but a lot of
ashkayga yapa jaguars
puma tiyak ak
ara
39 shukmanda they took another mana to not be ability to static relational
apasha (shaman) from ushana able to consume
upichishkauna somewhere else hallucinogenic
mana ushasha because they were drink
not able to drink
(ayak)
40 chi kan ningi that which you mana ali not good validity of a static relational
chi samita say (being afraid proposition
mana ali yapa of death) it's not
ali - yapa good, not good at
yuyarik chani all, I don't think
about it too much
41 tukuy it was like that chasna like that marrying static relational
ñañagunawan (not getting (refers to someone of
chasna payna married to previous the same last
wawayashka someone with the information) name
runas chaylla same last name)
for all of my
sisters who have
had children, just
like that
42 mana familia no surnames from mana no allowance of static relational
pura gastataga family, no having the
mana same surname
43 chun tukun it became quiet chun tukuna to suddenly noisy activity dynamic relational
become of the toucans
silent
44 runa mana there were no mana tiyana to not be people static referential
tiyanawra people present
45 aycha mana meat was lacking mana tiyana to not be wild game dynamic referential
tiyak ashka illak present
ak ashka
46 sisa illakpi lacking flowers illana to be lacking flowers static referential
47 y chi timpu at that time there illana to be lacking guns static referential
illapag illan were no guns
48 runas illashka and there were no illana to be lacking people static referential
sachay people in the
forest
available. 55
49 illarami riki it was gone, look! illana to be lacking spirit static referential
50 illan it was not there illana to be lacking bird static referential
51 mana rikunata we could not see mana rikuna to not see spirit in the static referential
mana it form of a bird
usharanchichu
chita
52 yanga we listened in rinrimalla just to the ability to static referential
uyaranchillami vain as the sound ear locate a bird
rinrimalla only traveled to based on its
the ears call
53 yaku illay uras perfume lacking illana to be lacking perfume static referential
time
54 kaybi mana it's no good here mana valina to not have validity of a static relational
valin worth proposition
55 mana… mana I don't know mana to not know knowledge of static epistemic
yachani yachana a fruit's
characteristics
56 mana yachani I don’t know mhm no knowledge of static epistemic
a fruit's
characteristics
57 imashi rira "where did it go?" illana to be lacking food scraps dynamic referential
nisha ña kaymi he said, "here
mikushka anga everything is
nishka illan ima eaten it is", he
kakuwas illakta said, it's gone,
mikushka even the scraps
are missing, eaten
58 mana (the cartridge) mana to not ignite ignition of static relational
tukyarachu didn't ignite tukyana cartridge
(event)
59 kasnamaga this is how they kuru muyulla just like a aesthetic static relational
ukuma kuru will be inside ball of quality
muyulla ruku an there, just like a worms
big ol' ball of
worms
60 iridzay tiag an ugliness they are iridzay ugliness aesthetic static relational
quality
61 chiga chasna and so like that iridza appears ugly aesthetic static relational
kuinta iridza she looks ugly rikurin quality
rikurin maun
available. 56
Correspondence
Alexander Rice
Department of Linguistics
University of Alberta
1-02B Assiniboia Hall
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E7
rice@ualberta.ca
Biographical notes
Alexander Rice is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Alberta. He holds a BA
and MA in linguistics from Brigham Young University and has a professional background in the
translation/localization industry. His work focuses on the documentation and description of the
Indigenous languages of Ecuador, multimodality, field methods, and morphosyntax. He has been
working with Amazonian Kichwa speakers since 2013 and collaborates with Janis Nuckolls and
Tod Swanson on documenting ideophones in Amazonian Kichwa for an audiovisual archive,
http:// quechuarealwords.byu.edu/.

Gesture Indicates Absence

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Gesture Indicates Absence

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Accepted in 2021 for publication in Gesture.

Please cite published version

A spread-fingered hand torque as an indicator of

Keywords: Ecuadorian Quechuan, co-speech gesture, recurrent gesture, absence

Background on the language and the SFHT gesture in the Ecuadorian

Figure 2. Varieties of Quechua in Ecuador (Aschmann, 2006)

more data is needed.

Corpus and methodology

Form of the spread-fingered hand torque

Figure 8. Delicia performing a symmetrical and synchronous two-handed SFHT (Token

Figure 9. Eulodia performing an asymmetrical and asynchronous two-handed SFHT

Orientation and Position

Semantic function of the spread-fingered hand torque

b. “apa yaya papaya chagra-y ni-ra” ni-sha maska-shka

b. “ña chasna chi runa-ta=ga ñuka taka-ra-ni” ni-sha

b. hahahahahahahahahaaa ña kunga-s chaki-ri-n chiga

d. ña hapi pasa-n shuk-ta

meaning such as INTERROGATIVES, EXCLAMATIVES, HYPOTHETICALS, and expressions of

b. yanga shuk muyu ni-shka=lla-ta

documentation projects, including more pedagogically friendly materials such as

Müller, Cornelia. 2014. Gestural modes of representation as techniques of depiction. In

of the International Phonetic Association 43(1). 107–120.

ailla:3A269542. Ecuadorian Lowland Quechua Collection of Alexander Rice. The

Table 1. Summary of token metadata

Table 2. Summary of kinesic features for each token

centre LH: 0.5

Table 3. Transcriptions, translations, and semantic information for each token

17 mana (the agricultural mana tiyana to not be agricultural static referential

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