Mimetic schemas in multimodal contact-establishing communication

Abstract

Contact-establishing is deservedly characterized as the major function of communication. Until recently, it has been mostly subjected to linguistic analysis aimed at identifying its discursive markers. Meanwhile, contact-establishing frequently appears in gesturing. The current work develops a cognitive view to gesture and speech alignment, and addresses multimodal contact-establishing communication as mediated by mimetic schemas or bodily schemas shared by communicants who engage in face-to-face and body-to-body interaction. Based on a multimodal experiment where participants engage into task-oriented expository dialogue, we identified two most common contact-establishing recurrent gestures, palm-up-open-hand (PUOH) and palm-down-open-hand (PDOH) gestures contingent on two mimetic schemas, SHOW and RESTRAIN. In the study, we explore the distribution of these two schemas in their sub-schemas in gesture and speech. Following the participants’ contact-establishing PUOH and PDOH gestures (manifesting SHOW and RESTRAIN sub-schemas) and verbal cues (cognitive, pragmatic, and functional semantic dimensions), we determined the multimodal alignment patterns mediated by SHOWand RESTRAIN mimetic schemas in contactestablishing communication. Additionally, the clusters of PUOH and PDOH contactestablishing gestures were determined via their linguistic correspondences since they account for common thinking-for-speaking growth points and the language profiles of PUOH and PDOH contact-establishing gestures. The results allowed to scale the mimetic sub-schemas as manifesting event and referent features such as situatedness, embodiment, performativity, referent definiteness, referent foregrounding, reification, dynamicity, addressing, agentivity, referentiality. Overall, we established that in cognitive dimension non-situated events prevail in PUOH gestures while situated events prevail in PDOH gestures. In pragmatic dimension there is the difference in constativity in PUOH gestures and in performativity in PDOH gestures. In functional semantic dimension PDOH gestures commonly occur with acts, while PUOH gestures are more frequented with attributes. Additionally, we identified that within-cluster distance in PDOH gestures is more obvious than in PUOH gestures, which signifies that the typological differences (mediated indirectly by linguistic characteristics) in PDOH gestures are more distinct. The data obtained provide new evidence in multimodal contact-establishing communication.