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Beattie G. , Shovelton H. : Interlocutors do get the message : how imagistic gestures add crucial meaning in narrative - KS [x/x]

Conférence

Jeudi 16 juin - 9h00-10h00
(Amphithéâtre)


-  Beattie, Geoffrey
-  Shovelton, Heather

University of Manchester, Manchester

Interlocutors do get the message : how imagistic gestures add crucial meaning in narrative

This talk will review research at Manchester, which has repeatedly demonstrated that participants who hear samples of speech and see the accompanying imagistic gestures do obtain signifi cant amounts of semantic information, particularly about the semantic features ‘size’ and ‘relative position’, compared to those who just hear the speech. But this research has been characterized by an emphasis on carefully controlled stimuli, restricted samples of speech and imagistic gesture and explicit experimental procedures. It left many questions unanswered. For example, it did not attempt to analyze the signifi cance of the additional information received from the gesture for the narrative as a whole. Our new research addresses this and other questions. Focusing on the semantic feature ‘size’ we isolated every single instance of size information in our corpus and identifi ed whether this size information was encoded in speech, in gesture, or in speech and gesture. Crucially, it considered the judged relative importance of each instance of size information. It found that high importance size information was signifi cantly more likely to be encoded in gesture rather than in speech, and suggests that speakers may vary what information is encoded gesturally, according to its salience for the overall meaning to be conveyed. In a second study we investigated whether the information in the imagistic gestures was represented linguistically elsewhere in the narrative. It found that two thirds of the semantic information, previously thought to be carried by gesture, was, in fact, represented either implicitly or explicitly elsewhere in the linguistic discourse. However, one third of the additional semantic information contained in the gestures was not represented linguistically, even when the whole narrative was considered. These new results, going beyond the original experimental paradigm, do demonstrate conclusively the communicative power of those imagistic gestures that accompany talk.