GESPIN – GESTURE & SPEECH IN INTERACTION – Poznań, 24-26 September 2009
Structures of meaning and reference – Investigating gestures of the concrete and abstract Silva H. Ladewig, Cornelia Müller & Sedinha Tessendorf European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) mail@silvaladewig.de, cmh.mueller@t-online.de, tessendorf@euv-frankfurt-o.de
Abstract Speech as well as gestures may serve as evidence for the cognitive processes involved at the moment of speaking or gesturing (see e.g., Cienki & Müller 2008a, b; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; McNeill 1992, 2000, 2005; McNeill & Duncan 2000; Müller 2007, 2008). The utterance ‘Es war ein langer Weg’ (“It was a long way”) can either refer to a concrete path or to a period of time. This also holds for a gesture drawing a line into the air coming with this utterance: It can either refer to a concrete path the speaker/gesturer has in mind or to a certain period of time that lays in front of a person. Accordingly, referential gestures can either refer to concrete or abstract entities or events (McNeill 1992, 2005; Müller 1998). However, the question of whether different forms reflect the different usages has not been investigated so far. This question built the starting point of our study on ‘concrete and abstract referential gestures’ (Müller 1998) out of which first results will be presented in this talk. More specifically, we tested the hypothesis that gestures of the concrete differ from gestures of the abstract with regard to their form. In order to approach this question, two experiments were conducted, in which altogether 20 subjects have participated so far. In cooperation with the Neurology research group of our project, a stimulus set of 40 stories each including a target item or phrase was set up (20 words, having both a concrete and an abstract sense, e.g. 'eine runde Bank' vs. 'eine runde Geschichte'; e.g. "a round bench" vs. “a complete story”, literal: "a round story"). In the first condition, the subjects retold the stories in two different settings: a) they talked to a recipient, and b) they talked to the camera. In the second condition subjects were asked to listen to the stories, repeat the target sentences, and perform a gesture. In the first condition the subjects only rarely accompanied the target items with gestures. The second condition yielded two specific results: 1) In some cases, form parameters of the gestures, such as hand shape or movement, involved in the creation of abstract referential gestures were less semantically loaded than in gestures of the concrete. 2) People use gestures to accompany different aspects of the utterance and thereby foreground particular aspects of meaning in a conversation. (Müller 2007, 2008) These findings verified the original hypothesis only partly. However, they give proof of Müller’s theory of a dynamic focus of attention and, more general, of her dynamic view of language. (Müller 2008)
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