Iconic gestures in face-to-face TV interviews

Abstract

This paper presents a study of iconic gestures as attested in a corpus of Greek face-to-face television interviews. The communicative significance of the iconic gestures situated in an interactional context is examined with regards to their semantics as well as the syntactic properties of the accompanying speech. Iconic gestures are classified according to their semantic equivalents, and are further linked to the phrasal units of the words co-occurring with them, in order to provide evidence about the actual syntactic structures that induce them. The findings support the communicative power of iconic gestures and suggest a framework for their interpretation based on the interplay of semantic and syntactic cues. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.