Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures Anna Inbar a, *, 1 , Leon Shor b, 1 a Tel Aviv University, Amnon VeTamar 10/3, Shoshanat HaAmaqim, 4298400, Israel b Tel Aviv University, HaMatmid 30/4, Ramat Gan, 5250148, Israel article info Article history: Received 10 December 2018 Received in revised form 19 February 2019 Accepted 19 February 2019 abstract The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural pat- terns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion d namely, ‘negativity’ d rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be consid- ered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond indi- vidual linguistic segments. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Negation is commonly defined as a process or construction in grammatical and semantic analysis that typically expresses the contradiction of some or all of a sentence's meaning (Crystal, 2008: 323). Every human language seems to have some morphosyntactic means at its disposal to express negation, suggesting that negation is possibly one of the universal features of human language (Miestamo, 2007 : 553; Horn, 2010a,b: 1). From a variety of perspectives, linguistic research has long been attempting to describe the different aspects of negation d its functional and structural properties, its role in language acquisition, its typological manifestations, and its neurological underpinnings (Giv on, 1978; Dahl, 2010; Horn, 2010a,b; Haspelmath, 2013; Serratrice and Allen, 2015; among many others). In recent years, however, the gestural realization of negation and its interface with the corresponding verbal negation have begun to receive scholarly attention. The interaction of certain gestures with verbal negation, the etymology of such gestures, and their functional description have recently been studied in several languages, such as Italian (Kendon, 2004: 248e264), English (Kendon, 2004: 248e264; * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: inbara9@gmail.com (A. Inbar), shor.leon@gmail.com (L. Shor). 1 Both authors have contributed equally to this work. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.02.011 0378-2166/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Journal of Pragmatics 143 (2019) 85e95