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Signed and spoken language contrastive research: A multimodal approach
Edited by Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant
[Languages in Contrast 22:2] 2022
► pp. 290–321

When hands stop moving, interaction keeps going

A study of manual holds in the management of conversation in French-speaking and signing Belgium

ORCID logo | University of Namur , Belgium

This study explores moments in signed and spoken conversation when manual production is on hold and its resulting interactive ramifications. Typically, the temporal structure of gesture and sign can be decomposed into a stream of distinct manual phases. There are moments, however, when this activity is stopped. This may happen for various reasons, e.g., when seeking attention, holding the floor or during overlaps. Holds have mostly been examined in sign languages regarding prosody, syntax, and corresponding to vowel lengthening in spoken languages. In gesture studies, they have been overlooked for not deemed relevant in the gesture-speech interface. By combining contrastive and multimodal analyses, this paper examines the relevance of holds as potential meaning-making practices deployed by LSFB signers and its comparison to Belgian French speakers. In 3 hours of video-recorded material drawn from 3 multimodal corpora, the following question is addressed: what are the roles of holds in the management of interaction within and across languages/modalities? While most of linguistic work considers manual movements to express referential content, the observations here push to reconsider the common boundary set between what constitutes gestural/linguistic phenomena in one language and what does not.

Keywords: gesture, contrastive analysis, multimodality, interaction, Belgian French/LSFB
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gesture and Sign in Interaction: The case for manual holds
    • 2.1Manual holds as part of the gesture and sign structure
    • 2.2Defining moments of gestural holds
    • 2.3Holds in signed discourse
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data Presentation
      • 3.1.1Corpora
      • 3.1.2Participants
      • 3.1.3Tasks
    • 3.2Data annotation
      • 3.2.1Annotation procedure
      • 3.2.2Formal identification of holds
      • 3.2.3Functional annotation of holds
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overview of the data
    • 4.2Interactive functions of holds in LSFB and BF conversations
      • 4.2.1Holds for turn-holding
      • 4.2.2Holds for turn suspension
      • 4.2.3Holds during collaborative word searching activities
      • 4.2.4Holds for monitoring addressees
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 3 June 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00021.lep
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