(Salle F104)
Ferré, Gaëlle
(University of York, Heslington)
Gestures and intonation in English narratives
A narrative is defi ned in the literature as a sequence of past events
told by a protagonist of these events (or another person to whom the
events have been reported). After a short background corresponding
to an introduction, the dramatic intensity of the narrative then
progressively increases until it reaches a climax, the actual point of
the narrative. The intensity then decreases in an anti-climax. Only
the background and climax are necessary to produce a narrative
though.
In our video recording samples (15 narratives varying in length
between 2 British speakers), we observed that there are regularly
gestures of turn-taking in the background. When the narrative
includes an increase of the tension phase the speaker employs a
growing number of beats and discourse organisation gestures, to
mark the different elements added to increase suspense. At the climax
point, all beats and gestures of discourse organisation cease
and the speaker changes to interactive gestures : in most cases, just
before the climax, the speaker turns both head and eyes towards
the listener while smiling and both mutual gaze and smile remain
all through the utterance of the climax. It is often accompanied
by a shift of the body towards the listener. Immediately after the
climax, the body gets back to a rest position and the speaker’s gaze
shifts away from the listener as well in most of the cases. It is to be
noticed though that the smile often remains and even more often
changes into open laughter either before or after the anti-climax
when there is one.
At the intonation level, we also noticed that whereas the background
is produced with a ‘normal’ voice intensity and rate of speech for
the speaker, the climax is on the contrary uttered with higher voice
intensity and a much slower rate of speech.
From this we can conclude that both intonation and gestures help
understand the pragmatic structure of narratives in English conversations.
