It is well known, that co-expressive gesticulation gestures develop their structure of movement accompanying the verbal and melodic structure of the utterance and also that they are linked to it semantically and pragmatically.
When analysing gesticulation gestures linked to verbal language and intonation, it seems to me a little bit difficult to establish a close descriptive relation between the movement structure of gesticulation gestures and the verbal and melodic structure of the utterance in spontaneous speech.
I think, that one of these categories or aspects has to do with the close relation between the more prominent segment in pitch range of the utterance and the more prominent phase in gesticulation structure.
Could you suggest me other categories or aspects I should pay attention?
Very interesting research!! I agree we should take all modalities into account when modelling communication.
In my opinion,the only way to arrive at good categories/aspects is to look at a lot of material and try to classify it from bottom up. All top-down approaches using intellectually/theoretically conceived categories are IMHO bound to fail, as they lack grounding. Do you have a lot of recordings you could look at?
As part of semiotics of performing coverbal gestures are excellent meaningful components. And without common gesticulation which is seen accompanying the word /surprisingly/ across gender divide the word would be less impactful. You may want to narrow the focus to common expressive words such Surprisingly, OMG, Sadly, Really!, Please! Thank you very much! and then refine the gesticulation to include inward and/or outward movements. The research would be very interesting if dialectal coverbal gesticulation are compared. Less formal less jargon vs more colloquial more slang accompanied gestures may open up new views of semiotics of performing either in rehearsed or spontaneous speech situations. Thank you for asking.
Chris and Jyh, thanks a lot for your suggestions.
I have a lot of hours of audiovisual material. As I'm interested in analysing spontaneous speech, I have recorded people speaking spontaneously within different communicative contexts, in which people usually do not use a formal register. It is quite common to find a colloquial and dialectal use of language.
I think, it is a good idea to beginn with expressive words and then consider larger verbal structures, as Jyh suggests.
I also agree with Chris, that it is also very important to conduct an analysis from a bottom-up viewpoint. Though also I consider it is important not to lose sight of the whole context, in which, for example, an statement is uttered. Sometimes, It is funny to observe how behave the elements from different modalities when they interact each other in order to (re)establish harmony between them.
My main concern is to map the processes involved and try to translate them into manageable categories/units.
I saw an article on how by pointing with his fingers the nonwhite speaker is communicating power. And the listeners invested a lot of trust in that episode. Try to break the categories into isolated analytics as a start. This may be in line with bottom up approach
Dear José,
As you know, Núria Esteve-Gibert recently discussed her PhD thesis exactly on the alignment between gesture, prosody and segmental material. Since the research question of "gesture-prosody-text alignament" is actually not new (dating back to even before McNeill's 1992 book), Nuria's thesis focussed on some more specific and new issues, that had to do mainly with language adquisition and infants. In case you are interested in the alignmanet/interplay among gesture, prosody and segmental material in adults, you might have a look at the Introduction of Nuria's thesis, where she summarizes in a few pages the most relevant studies about this subject.
See you in June :-)
Paolo
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