From Trouble in the Talk to New Resources: The Interplay of Bodily and Linguistic Resources in the Talk of a Speaker of English as a Second Language

Abstract

This chapter explores how a family of related expressions emerge from repairs and are refined over time by a novice speaker of L2 English. We trace longitudinally a connection between a complex of deictic (pointing) and dynamic (hand movements) gestures and a small family of specific, related linguistic resources centred on the verbs “ask”, “tell”, and “say”. The data reveal that the L2 speaker packages these linguistic resources with particular gestures and re-uses these gesture-word packages in subsequent conversations. We will show in detail how the gesture-talk combination is used to display understanding and achieve intersubjectivity and how it changes over time as the gesture is subsumed by the emergent verbal language and becomes a communicative resource in its own right when circumstance demands it.