(Salle F08)
Parrill, Fey
(University of Chicago, Chicago)
Common ground is in the hands of the speaker :
a multimodal investigation of information
packaging
This paper reports on research investigating the relationship between
common ground (Clark & Haviland 1977) and the semiotic features
appearing in gesture, as part of continuing work on gesture’s role in
information packaging. Information packaging describes how speakers
shape utterances to meet the expected needs of interlocutors
(Chafe 1976). Levy & McNeill (1992) have shown that gestures correlate
with aspects of information packaging -more complex representational
gestures tend to occur with discourse-new elements, e.g..
Thus, while information packaging has syntactic refl exes, gesture
serves as a non-linguistic index of a speaker’s communicative decisions,
information missed by considering the verbal channel alone.
Information packaging interacts with common ground, or knowledge/
beliefs shared by interactants (Clark 1992). This project addresses
the extent to which common ground impacts gesture production.
Participants watched cartoon events and described target motion
events within them to an experimenter, or to a friend who was either
present or absent while the participant watched the video. In addition,
when asked to describe the events, participants received different
prompts which functioned to manipulate the discourse status of
elements in the event. This permitted an exploration of the infl uence
of shared knowledge on speech and gesture while also manipulating
the speaker’s construal of the event.
Encoding in speech and gesture changed as a function of both
addressee and prompt, showing an interaction between the speaker’s
construal and shared knowledge. This work provides insight into
pragmatic constraints which operate in the packaging of information
in both modalities.
