Multimodality of Transitive, Intransitive and Copular Constructions in Spoken Language

Suwei Wu

doi:10.13189/lls.2019.070601

Abstract

In line with the multimodal view of language, some studies found a relation between gesture and a fundamental grammatical category - transitivity. However, previous studies have simply employed the data of elicited narratives, which were unnatural and not interactive, and they were restricted to a few particular transitive and intransitive events. Against this background, this study employs more natural and interactive data – conversations – and considers a larger variety of grammatical constructions which are basic and frequently used in spoken language, including high-transitive, low-transitive, intransitive and copular constructions. Specifically, using a large amount of conversational data from the Red Hen database, this study examines the use of gestures accompanying the four constructions, and the question to what extent the gestures preferred relate to the ways of conceptualizing these constructions. Results indicate that the use of gestures accompanying the four constructions shows distinctions in the ways in which speakers conceptualize these constructions. These results suggest that these constructions seem to be multimodal in nature, which provides further empirical support for the multimodal stance that gesture is part of language.

Highlights

When we speak, we produce a sequence of words, and sometimes make bodily movements which are called gestures
In line with the multimodal view of language that gesture and speech come from a same origin or that gesture is part of language [1], there is an increasing number of studies investigating what grammatical categories or constructions in spoken language are coordinated with gesture use, with a particular focus on representational gestures, e.g. Duncan [2], McNeill [3], Parrill [4] and Cienki and Iriskhanova [5]
When a speaker described an activity whereby he put a battery into a microphone, he said, put it in, and at the same time he made the gesture as follows: he moved two fists together, as if he were putting a battery, which was held in his right hand, into the microphone, held in his left hand

Summary

Introduction

We produce a sequence of words, and sometimes make bodily movements which are called gestures. Using a small dataset (i.e. four narratives of a single stimulus) in American English, McNeill [1] first examined how transitivity in speech relates to the choice of character viewpoint gestures (CVPT) – in which the speaker imitates some action such as the activity of walking – or observer viewpoint gestures (OVPT) – in which one moves one’s hands to depict a scene as viewed, such as tracing the path that someone walked along. Afterwards, Parrill [4] used a larger dataset of narrative language in American English (69 narrations) to verify McNeill’s claim based on. Their findings are supported by Beattie and Shovelton [6], who found that CVPT gestures were more likely to evoke transitive descriptions, while OVPT gestures were more likely to evoke intransitive ones

Methods

Results

Conclusion