Dickens in Chol

Abstract

AbstractThis study examines differences in gesture production in narrative contexts between American and Chol Mayan speakers at the narrative, metanarrative, and paranarrative levels of discourse, as well as differences in the production of linear temporal gestures. First, a comparison is made between the gestures produced by speakers of American English and Chol, a Western Maya language, as they tell the story of A Christmas Carol to an interviewer. The study shows a dire contrast between the American and Chol interpretation of this classic novel, and notable differences in the speech-accompanying gestures used by Americans and Chol Mayans respectively. American speakers’ temporal utterances are often accompanied by the well-documented lateral timeline gestures, where earlier events are located to the left of the gestural space, and later events are located to the right of the gestural space. By contrast, in Chol utterances no lateral, sagittal, or vertical timeline gestures accompany any form of temporal reference; the vast majority of gestures co-occur with metanarrative and paranarrative statements and have no explicit temporal content. The second part of the study analyzes the gestures made by a Chol speaker while telling a traditional story. A qualitative analysis of this traditional narrative shows that, when telling a story of the Chol tradition that is well known to the speaker, pragmatically-motivated gestures that occur at the metanarrative and paranarrative levels are much fewer than gestures occurring at the narrative level. In this traditional narrative, the gestures co-occurring with sequential, deictic temporal expressions and temporal metaphors did not reflect any kind of timeline that resembled those made by the American speakers in the Dickens in Chol task.