Researchers involved: Silva Ladewig (StabiGest), Vinicius Macuch-Silva (ViCom Post-Doc-Fellow)
In the last decade, research on co-speech gestures has looked at so-called recurrent gestures, manual movements which show stable form-meaning associations (Bressem & Müller, 2014; Ladewig, 2014). One key finding from this body of work is that these gestures are often used to express pragmatic meanings, some recurrent gestures such as the palm up open hand being remarkably widespread across linguistic communities (e.g., Müller 2004; Cooperrider et al. 2018). One outstanding question relates to whether recurrent gestures co-occur systematically with verbal material that expresses similar meanings, such as for instance discourse particles.
We tackle exactly this question in our collaborative project. By focusing on interactional data from spoken German, we investigate the multimodal distribution of one verbal device which is expected to co-occur with recurrent gestures marking pragmatic contrast. Namely, we investigate the usage of the German modal particle eigentlich, which is known to express a variety of subtle meanings related to pragmatic contrast (Eckardt 2006). For this purpose, several project meetings will be conducted to (a) annotate and analyze the relevant corpus data, and (b) develop best practices to extend the annotation to other verbal devices in the second phase of ViCom.
Our collaboration will take place in Berlin, where both collaborators currently reside. The work is to be divided into two phases. First, we will recruit a student assistant who will annotate the data for any occurrences of the target verbal device eigentlich and any co-occurring visual behavior. In particular, we will recruit someone who has already worked with the PI Ladewig on the relevant dataset, and as such is already familiarized with the data and with the annotation of gestural behavior.
We will then further annotate the pre-processed data, focusing on describing (a) the formal properties of the engaged bodily articulators and (b) the discourse context surrounding the target multimodal utterances. The overall aims of the meetings are to annotate and analyze the data, shape the annotation scheme such that it can be extended to other pragmatically relevant verbal devices, discuss the results of the analysis, prepare a joint presentation for the ISGS conference, and plan a joint publication.
The ultimate goal of the project is to report our findings in a joint collaborative publication.