Grammatical aspect, gesture and event construal in Russian, German and French - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication dans un congrès Année : 2015

Grammatical aspect, gesture and event construal in Russian, German and French

Résumé

The analysis of speech and gesture provides insight into the mental representation of how an event occurred in time and how people communicate about it in a multimodal fashion. Duncan (2002) showed that the duration of gesture strokes tends to be longer and more agitated with event descriptions in the imperfective than with those using perfective verb forms. These findings were further confirmed for English by McNeill (2003) and Parrill et al. (2013). Research including English as a second language (Becker et al. 2011) has shown that both the production and comprehension of verbs expressing different event types can be related to co-speech gesture features that reflect specific semantic aspectual categories going back to Vendler (1957). However, despite the universality of time as a factor in human existence, the languages of the world have a wide range of ways for characterizing how events play out in time. The present project considers Russian, German and French: three languages with key structural differences in expressing aspect (the temporal contour of events). The data for this study were collected using the prompts from Becker et al. (2011) to elicit short personal narratives about events of different types. Ten pairs of university students served as participants with informed consent in each country. The mean length of the conversations was ten minutes. Verbs referring to past events were coded for tense and aspect as well as past or non-past time of events narrated. How can we know if the use of different grammatical forms available in different languages relates to different kinds of thinking for speaking and if so, in what ways? We cannot assume that the imperfective forms in one language necessarily mean the same thing as those in another language. However, we can see through gestural behavior if there is something similar or not in speakers’ experience when talking about events in the past using imperfect(ive) aspectual forms as opposed to other verb forms. In addition to the coding of the verb forms in the data, any gestures used in the same grammatical clauses as the verbs are being coded for their forms. Rather than using the form features common in gesture research (McNeill 1992), our study is employing a physiologically-based kinesiological system (Boutet 2010). The set of categories involved prioritize movement analysis, considering details of the segments of the hand and forearm moved, the form of movement, its flow, changes in velocity, etc. These serve as micro-level categories grouped for interpretation in terms of meso-level aspectual features -durativity, punctuality, (un)boundedness (Müller 2000). The gestural representations of speakers’ construals of event structures can be correlated with the verb forms used (macro-level categories) and compared across the three languages. The study thus provides a window onto speakers’ dynamic construals of events. By tying this gestural analysis to the tense/aspectual forms of the verbs, the study shows how the analysis of gesture can provide solutions to semantic analysis in cognitive linguistics, where meaning is increasingly being studied in terms of mental simulation (Barsalou 2008).
Loading...
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

halshs-01424053, version 1 (01-01-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-01424053 , version 1

Citer

Alan Cienki, Ray Becker, Dominique Boutet, Aliyah Morgenstern, Olga Irishkhanova, et al.. Grammatical aspect, gesture and event construal in Russian, German and French. AFLICO 2015, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, May 2015, Grenoble, France. ⟨halshs-01424053⟩
196 Consultations
0 Téléchargements
Dernière date de mise à jour le 21/04/2024
comment ces indicateurs sont-ils produits

Partager

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Plus