Speech-accompanying gestures in Russian: Functions and verbal context1

Abstract

The study of the relationships between speech and gesture promises a lot of insights into speech production and comprehension processes. In this work we explore syntactic and semantic characteristics of verbal correlates of speech-accompanying gestures. The results of the corpora studies show, that we can reveal the statistical probability for certain types of gestures to appear in given context. For example, semantic correlates of deictic gestures are mostly noun phrases, and only in few cases these gestures correspond to adverbs, although they may coincide with any part of a clause. Single beats differ from other gesture types in their tendency to accompany speech disfluencies, discourse markers, and unimportant parts of a clause. Looking from the perspective if the meaning of words, accompanied by gestures, we can see, that new or re-activated referents might be presented with deictic gestures, uncertainty or direct speech are a domain of beat gestures.