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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 28:2 (2023) ► pp.172–201

Towards a corpus-based description of speech-gesture units of meaning

The case of the circular gesture

| Macau University of Science and Technology
| University of Nottingham

The theories and methods in corpus linguistics (CL) have had an impact on numerous areas in applied linguistics. However, the interface between CL and multimodal speech-gesture studies remains underexplored. One fundamental question is whether it is possible, and even appropriate, to apply the theories and paradigms established based on textual data to multimodal data. To explore this, we examine how CL can assist investigating lexico-grammatical patterns of speech co-occurring with a recurrent gesture (i.e. the circular gesture). Sinclair’s (1996) unit of meaning model is used to describe the co-gestural speech patterns. The study draws on a subset of the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus, in which 570 instances of circular gestures and their co-occurring speech are identified and analysed. We argue that Sinclair’s unit of meaning model can be extended to include speech-gesture patterns, and that those descriptions enable a more nuanced understanding of meaning in context.

Keywords: circular gestures, multimodal corpus analysis, co-gestural speech patterns, unit of meaning model
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Recurrent gestures
  • 3.The unit of meaning model
  • 4.Corpus and methods
    • 4.1Data selection
    • 4.2Speech-gesture annotations and concordance
    • 4.3Cluster analysis
    • 4.4Concordance plot
    • 4.5Sampling techniques to develop a lexico-grammatical framework
    • 4.6Cross-checking and inter-rater reliability tests of speech patterns
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1The multimodal unit of meaning of the circular gesture: Overall distribution
    • 5.2Main category: Colligation
      • 5.2.1Clause
      • 5.2.2Verb phrase (+ ___)
      • 5.2.3Noun phrase (+ ___)
      • 5.2.4Modification (+ noun phrase)
      • 5.2.5Dysfluent speech
      • 5.2.6Prepositional phrase
      • 5.2.7Predictive (+___)
      • 5.2.8Discourse marker
      • 5.2.9Conjunction
    • 5.3Main category: Semantic preference
      • 5.3.1Deixis
      • 5.3.2Negation
      • 5.3.3Confirmation
    • 5.4Main category: Semantic prosody
      • 5.4.1Intensification
      • 5.4.2Vagueness
      • 5.4.3Monitoring mutual ground
    • 5.5Sub-category: Semantic preference (‘on-going process’)
  • 6.Towards a multimodal unit of meaning
  • Acknowledgements
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20174.che
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