PAVELIN

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GESPIN – GESTURE & SPEECH IN INTERACTION – Poznań, 24-26 September 2009

Speech Gestures And The Pragmatic Economy Of Oral Expression In Face-To-Face Interaction Bogdanka Pavelin Lešić University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Romanic Languages Ivana Lučića 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia bogdanka.pavelin@ffzg.hr

Abstract The aim of this paper is to observe whether speech gestures contribute to the pragmatic economy and redundancy of the global utterance. Speech gestures, spoken words and their prosody are closely related in speech. The term speech gestures is used for referring to the visual suprasegmental manifestations of the spoken language in the context of any oral face-toface interaction. It includes facial expressions, eye movements, head/hand movements and the body movement in general as well as touches, postures and proxemics. The offered examples illustrate different types of gestures belonging to the category called the syllinguistic gestures i. e. the suprasegmental gestures occurring only during the oral speech activity. The research is based on the transcriptions of all perceptible behaviour (auditory and visual) in short sequences of videotaped narratives and interactions of children and adults in order to observe how sound and movement work in synergy and are in fact different aspects of the same multimodal speech phenomenon. The syllinguistic gesture conveys the speaker´s attitude to the words spoken, introduces the new content in regard to the spoken words, illustrates iconically, metaphorically or by deixis the content of the utterance in the extralinguistic context in which it occurs. The examples of the syllinguistic gestures show that the use of speech gestures depends on the needs and circumstances of the particular speech pragmatics. Thus for example, if there is noise in the auditory channel, more information is likely to be carried out gesturally. Whatever the needs of the particular speech pragmatics, and whatever their role in it, the syllinguistic gestures are the important part of any spoken utterance, largely contributing to its pragmatic economy and redundancy. The richness of the segmental and suprasegmental means of expression underlie the secret of endless originality and efficiency of the spoken language in the face-to-face interaction and its capacity to function creatively in the unlimited number of situations. Key words: speech gestures, global utterance, pragmatic economy, redundancy, language, segmental, suprasegmental

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Introduction

The closer observation of any oral face-to-face interaction reveals spoken language in its multimodality. Spoken language is multimodal, because there is more than one means of expression engaged in its realization : verbal, vocal, visual, tactile. It is not only made of sound producing words and utterances in a certain linguistic system and following certain rhythm, tempo and intonation. It is also made of pauses and silences as well as of movement : postures, hand and body movements, facial expressions, eye contacts and touches.


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Referring to the visual manifestations of the spoken language in the context of face-to-face interaction, we are using the term speech gestures. By speech gestures, I am referring to all the elements of the visible bodily movement that are not produced exclusively for a practical purpose but result from the speech process itself. The bodily movement is observed at several levels:  head/face : head and eye movements and facial expressions  from neck to waist : postures and movements of shoulders, arms and hands  below the waist : postures and movements of feet and legs. Moreover, the touches and the spatial organization or proxemics of the protagonists during the interaction has to be taken into account during the observations. While we speak, we move our head, our hands, our entire body and the listener pays attention not only to our words and to their prosody but also to our bodily movement, postures and positions. While we speak, we keep an eye on the listener, on his/her facial expressions, head and eye movements as well as hand and the whole body movements and postures. All these factors have an impact on our speech, shaping our oral discourse. Nevertheless, these aspects of oral speech have often been given only a passing remark by linguists. It is since the 80´s that the linguistic studies turn more and more toward these topics. D. McNeill´s (1985) article So You Think Gestures are Nonverbal ? and A. Kendon´s (1986) Some reasons for studying gesture largely contributed to the change of view on gestures as an important part of oral speech expression and not the irrelevant and accidental subproduct of the oral speech activity. So the present study is founded on the assertion that gestures are the essential part of the utterance and that they contribute to the pragmatic economy and redudancy of the overall spoken language expression in face-to-face communication. The typology of gestures used in this paper is grounded in the typology proposed by J. Cosnier (1987:296) with some modifications introduced in it (Pavelin: 2002a). The speech gestures can be :  quasi-linguistic or emblematic,  syllinguistic. Whereas emblems are likely to be interpreted in a particular sociolinguistic community with or without the cooccurring spoken utterance (Kendon: 1992a) the interpretation of the syllinguistic gestures arises directly from its functions in the overall speech utterance. So the syllinguistic gestures belong to the ´gesticulation´ part on the Kendon´s continuum (McNeill 1995: 37), if the gesticulation comprises also what K.-E. McCullough calles ´the speech-framed gestures´ i.e. gestures occupying the slot in the sentence to complete the segmental sentence structure, for example (Pavelin 2002a: 67) : “She kissed me” / the speaker´s head bends to the left, while she´s smiling, the index finger of her left hand gently touches her right cheek /. The meaning of the overall utterance is : She kissed me gently on the cheek, although the listener heard only She kissed me seeing the deictic gesture which completes the overall utterance as well as the modalizing facial expression conveying tacitly : I appreciate what she did. The category of syllinguistic gestures is divided into three subcategories:  The synchronization gestures (the speaker´s gestures are phatic and the listener´s gestures are regulatory) which ensure the speech turns and the conversational flow between the interactants.  The phonogenic gestures result from the activity of the phonatory organs during oral speech (e.g. lip movement). The famous McGurk and MacDonald effect (1976) should be mentioned here to illustrate the importance of the phonogenic gestures for the auditory speech perception. They proved that the auditory perception of the adult subjects is influenced by the visual input as well as auditory. And if there´s mismatch, there´s change in the auditory perception.  the coverbal gestures are the suprasegmental part of the utterance which is inseparable from its segmental part. In this subcategory of speech gestures we find what McNeill calls iconics, metaphorics, deictics and beats (McNeill 1995: 76). The ´speech-framed

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Bogdanka Pavelin Lešić: Speech Gestures and The Pragmatic Economy of Oral Expression in Face-to-Face Interaction

gestures´ mentioned above that are actually either iconics, metaphorics or deictics without the immediately cooccurring spoken words, as well as the modalizors or the modal gestures, namely the facial expressions conveying the interactants´ attitude toward his/her words and toward the partner of the interaction (Pavelin 2002a: 108-109), belong to the category of coverbal gestures.

2 2.1

Methods and Materials

Objectives

The movement and the sound, or to be more precise, the speech gestures, the spoken words and their prosody are closely related in speech. The present paper is to examine if this assumption is true by directly observing movement and sound synergy in spoken face-to-face interactions, and trying to answer the following question: Do the speech gestures contribute to the pragmatic economy and redundancy of the spoken utterance ?

2.2

Data

2.3

Data analysis

The data in this paper consist of the mycroanalyses of the videotaped interactions in the French as foreign language classroom (9-10 year old croatian children at the school of Alliance française in Zagreb), as well as the extracts of the television broadcast audiovisual material of the spontaneous spoken interactions. All these data originate from the book in French, Le Geste à la Parole, published in 2002.This paper is in a way the presentation in English of some of its topics and the further development of some issues already opened in the book.

2.3.1 Transcriptions The microanalyses are based on the ethological approach proposed by J. Cosnier (Cosnier, KerbratOrecchioni 1987 : 292) :  analyze an authentic interaction in which participants behave spontaneously,  take into account the nonverbal aspect,  study the utterance within the context of the interaction, being thus regarded as the «cooperative utterance» i. e. shaped by the presence of the speaker and other participants in the given interaction. The analyzed interactions are authentic in the sense that they took place in their usual setting and context, with usual participants, following their usual course of action. However, they are not spontaneous everyday face-to-face conversations videotaped without somebody´s knowing, namely because three cameras were used in the classroom : one oriented to the teacher, and the other two to the each side of the audience. The participants in the interactions were not informed that their verbal or nonverbal communicative practices would be analyzed. The present transcriptions try to capture as many perceptible elements of the verbal and visual behaviour as possible in order to observe the way in which they result in the global utterance. So the speech gestures are not isolated in the transcriptions from the co-occuring oral production. On the contrary, they are regarded as part of it. Nevertheless, it is impossible to capture all the verbal and nonverbal manifestations in the face-to-face interaction. Despite all the precautions in order to achieve maximum objectivity, the risk of losing or deforming some elements of auditory or visual manifestations has to be taken into account. There are several possible coding schemes of nonverbal body behaviour (Scherer, Ekman 1982: 38):  verbal labeling, such as <pout> for <forward lip protrusion>.

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However, the use of the word pout can evoke connotations (e.g. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 2001 : petulant annoyance, tendency to make onself look sexually attractive) that are not necessarily pertinent in the transcribed section of the given speech interaction.  more formalized depiction of certain body movement, for example <push one´s closed lips forward> ,  categorizing movement by function, for example deictic or beat gesture. It entails the difficulty that coders make a priori judgements on speaker´s intentions or do not differentiate movements that have similar function but can be distinguished on other criteria.  drawings and sketches,  symbolical annotation (cf. the symbols used in the present transcriptions in the Figure 1). Although the coding schemes may differ from author to author, they are in most of the cases grounded in the combination of formalized verbal depiction of body movement, of its functional categorization, of drawings, sketches and symbolical annotation (McNeill 1995: 377-391, Kendon 2004: 362-364) with the intention to make the transcript accessible for the immediate interpretation. The present transcriptions combine in the same way the different coding schemes of body movement, namely symbolical annotation, drawings and formalized verbal depiction in order to make the transcriptions as readable as possible. The transcriptions result from the microanalytical approach proposed by R. Birdwhistell (1952): all perceptible elements of behaviour are transcribed in the short sequences of face-to-face interaction as well as the posturoproxemic organisation i.e. postures and positions of the protagonists in the given situation. The visual body movement is never presented isolatedly from other elements of the spoken utterance, namely from its verbal and prosodic elements. Transcribing the multimodal manifestations of the spoken utterance in the face-to-face interaction is an extremely time-consuming activity. As simple as it may seem at first sight, the same sequence has to be visioned and revisioned many times in order to perceive and transcribe the different manifestations co-occuring in the same utterance. Time and patience are the inevitable inconvenience of this approach. Recently much progress has been made in the creation of new coding mechanisms, as for example the spatiotemporal coding in Anvil which opens up the spatial dimension for multi-track video coding (Kipp: 2008). It inspires me with much hope that the future annotations of the visual oral behaviour will become more and more accurate and easy to read. The short sequences of the spoken face-to-face communication transcribed in the multimodality of its manifestations (auditory, visual, tactile) show that the utterance isn´t only linear, segmental, but consists as well of the vertical, suprasegmental dimension (cf. Figure 2). Beside the speech gestures the suprasegmental dimension is composed of the prosodical elements of speech (rhythm, tempo, pitch, stress, pauses) and proxemics. The spoken language is not only made up of words producing utterances in a certain linguistic system and following certain rhythm, tempo and intonation, but it is also made up of pauses and silences as well as of the visible movement : postures, hand and global body movement, facial expressions, eye contacts and touches. The structuring of these elements could be presented as follows : CONTEXT + {SEGMENTAL + SUPRASEGMENTAL}= GLOBAL/ MULTIMODAL UTTERANCE

2.3.2 The examples of the coverbal syllinguistic gestures contributing to the global utterance The coverbal syllinguistic gestures closely refer in various ways to the segmental part of the of speech.They are not part of any explicit repertoire or code and they are therefore free to carry out different functions according to the needs of the particular speech pragmatics. They are the integral part of the global utterance they appear in. It is impossible to interpret them or fully discern their function in isolation from other components of the global utterance. Here are some examples of the coverbal syllinguistic gestures mentioned in the Introduction in order to illustrate their contribution to the pragmatic economy or redundancy of the utterance : 1. The beats, usually hand and head movements participate in the rhythmical structuring of speech and mostly do not present a discernible meaning. They time out, accent or emphasize a particular

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Bogdanka Pavelin Lešić: Speech Gestures and The Pragmatic Economy of Oral Expression in Face-to-Face Interaction

segmental element of the utterance. In the Figure 3, the teacher explains the task in the test to the class, her beats are emphasizing each and every word. The pragmatic economy of the utterance resides in the fact that by simply reading the task, the teacher simultaneously conveys by the suprasegmental means of expression : What I say is extremely important and you need to pay attention to every word of it. 2. The modalizors or the modal gestures are mostly facial expressions. They convey the speaker´s attitude and refer to the pragmatic meaning of the utterance. The speaker´s facial expressions do not only nor necessarily display his/her mood or emotional state of mind, they are also used to produce certain speech act (for example the one of order, invitation or request) without stating it explicitly by the use of a performative verb (e.g. I order you to do this). So the facial expression of the utterance “Come here!” in the Figure 4 carries simultaneously the additional pragmatic meaning to the segmental part of the utterance: I order you to come here/you must come!, and in the utterance “Come here.” in the Figure 5: I kindly invite you to come. Thus there´s no burdening of the segmental part of the utterance with more words than actually pronounced in both examples : “Come here”. 3. Deictic gestures are pointing movements for example “It´s your turn!” in the Figure 6. It is an example of the redundancy of gesture in regard to the accompanying speech. This redundancy can have different pragmatic reasons. In the particular example, there was noise in the auditory channel and the speaker wasn´t sure whether his words would be heard. It is important to mention that deictics do not always point to concrete entities in the gesture space. Their meaning often depends on the referential value attributed to the particular part of the gesture space in the context of oral discourse (McNeill 1995: 18). 4. Iconic gestures depict imagery of a concrete or abstract concept in different ways : - Spatiographic gestures, depicting a spatial structure as in the Figure 7 in which the gesture is only in apparent redundancy with the segmental part of the utterance “The Parliament was surrounded by the police forces”, because this gesture really serves to the pragmatic economy of the utterance conveying : There was no way out for them to escape, sparing thus the segmental part of the utterance of the additional words. In the Figure 8 the pronounced utterance “The two towers dominate the view on the village.” is enriched by the new content carried out by the co-occurring spatiographic gesture: The towers are situated diagonally to each other., contributing thus to the pragmatic economy of the overall utterance. - Kinetomimic gestures are miming a state or an action spoken about. For example in the Figure 9 the utterance pronounced is: “She fell sick”. The accompanying gesture is both redundant with the verbal part, and contributes to the pragmatic economy of the overall utterance conveying non verbally : She couldn´t even stand on her feet any more. - Pictographic gestures are drawing the referent in the gesture space. In the Figure 10 the pictomimic gesture accompanies the spoken utterance “It´s a small house for camping”. The redundancy of the gesture serves the teacher to explain the french word (une tente) to the croatian learners describing the concept without using the translation to their mother tongue. 5. Ideographic or metaphoric gestures are referring to abstract concepts in terms of the concrete imagery of objects and their spatial relations. The Figures 11 and 12 show the behaviour of the teacher to her students who starts explaining a new word by saying: “For example!” Her hand movements introduce „the example“ as if it were a concrete object in the gesture space (cf. containers or conduit metaphors in McNeill 1995:14), and her head/eyebrow and eye movements call for the listener´s special attention. The pragmatic economy resides in the fact that the content of the metaphoric hand gesture introduces the new word as a concrete object in the gesture space conveying pragmatically : What I´m explaining to you is not an abstraction far away from the reality, it´s the knowledge you can grasp and make the immediate use of it and the speaker´s head/eye/eyebrow movements are modal gestures conveying at the same time : You need to pay particular attention to what I´m going to say because it is very important. Yet there were actually pronounced only two words: “For example!”

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3

Discussion

The fact that all natural languages are characterized by the duality of patterning doesn´t mean that they don´t have at their disposal elements external to the system of double articulation. Some authors categorize these extrasystemic elements of language as paralinguistic. I prefer using the term of suprasegmental elements of language (Martinet: 1970). Language in its broader sense is not only the context-independent grammatical, phonological and semantical system, but it also consists of the context-dependent aspects covered by the term pragmatics. Therefore the use of language does not involve only the elements from the linguistic system, but also the suprasegmental, extrasystemic elements being organized hic and nunc in the particular speech pragmatics contributing to the pragmatic economy and redundancy of the overall utterance (cf. the examples in 2.3.2). All these means are more or less socioculturally determined and belong to the speaker´s competence in the given speech community. The speech gestures and other suprasegmental elements of speech are not so strongly predetermined by convention as the segmental elements of speech. Furthermore, the conventions of gesture use are not necessarily artbitrary nor stable as those governing the duality of patterning in the linguistic system. Therefore the use of gestures and other suprasegmental means of expression is free to respond with great efficiency to the demands of the particular face-to-face interaction, operating of course in synergy with the segmental elements of the linguistic system. The expression of spoken language, segmental and suprasegmental, is largely determined by the principle of the economy i.e. the principle of minor effort and maximum achievement in the given circumstances. If the speech gesture cannot contribute to the maximum achievement in the given pragmatics, it tends to be less present in the oral speech expression. So the research on the relation between gesture and speech in congenitally blind and sighted language-learners shows that (Iverson, Tencer, Lany, Goldin-Meadow 2000: 126) : “blind children appear to rely on gesture to a lesser degree than do sighted children. Thus while the visual input may not be essential for the emergence of gesture, the absence of vision appears to influence the extent to which young blind children use gesture to communicate, in most cases, dramatically decreasing its rate. Gesture may be used relatively infrequently because it is presumably a less efficient means of communication.”

Speaking of the pragmatic economy, we shouldn´t forget the redundancy as the other side of the same phenomenon : provide the listener with far more cues than needed for easier and faster interpretation. Moreover the auditory speech perception itself is not a purely auditory process, the visual manifestations having important implications for the undersanding of speech perception (McGurk, Macdonald 1976: 746). The efficiency of the spoken language as an instrument of communication is not guaranteed by the perfect production and reception of every single element pronounced. Thanks to the redundancy operating at the segmental as well as at the suprasegmental level of the global utterance, the listener can interpret the utterance without capturing each and every part of it.

4

Conclusion

Speech gestures and pauses work in synergy with the verboacoustic activity, as the multiple components of the global speech process in the given situation. Their use in the pragmatics of oral discourse is motivated by the principle of pragmatic economy and redundancy within the multimodal utterance. The principle of pragmatic economy of language is to say more with less effort and time involved, and the principle of redundancy is based on the offer of far more cues than needed to guarantee the easier and faster interpretation. The term economy is being used here in the sense of the principle of functioning. The speech gestures spare us in many ways from the computational and phonatory effort of using too many linear, segmental elements in our everyday face-to-face interactions, offering at the same time enough cues for easy and fast interpretation.

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Bogdanka Pavelin Lešić: Speech Gestures and The Pragmatic Economy of Oral Expression in Face-to-Face Interaction

So if we go back to the examples of syllinguistic gestures, there´s often a pragmatic economy or redundancy motive underlying their function : emphasizing certain segmental parts of the utterance in order to draw the listener´s attention upon them, sparing the utterance of burdening it with too much performative verbs such as „I order you to “ or „I invite you to“, repeating, substituting, contradicting or augmenting the semantic content given verbally. The use of the speech gestures and other suprasegmental components depends on the communicational needs and circumstances of the protagonists of speech in the particular situation. The richness of the segmental and suprasegmental means of expression underlie the secret of endless originality and efficiency of the spoken language in the face-to-face interaction and its capacity to function creatively in the unlimited number of situations. Bibliography Birdwhistell, R. 1952. Introduction to Kinesics. Louisville: University of Louisville Press. Bouvet, D. 2001 La dimension corporelle de la parole: Les marques posturo-mimo-gestuelles de la parole, leurs aspects métonymiques et métaphoriques, et leur rôle au cours d´un récit. Paris: Peteers. Calbris, G. 1990. Semiotics of French Gesture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Calbris, G. 2003. L´expression gestuelle de la pensée de l´homme politique. Paris: CNRS Editions, coll. Communication. Cosnier, J., Berrendonner, A., Coulon, J., Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. 1982. Les voies du langage, communications verbales, gestuelles et animales, Paris : Dunod. Cosnier, J., Brossard, A. 1984. La communication non verbale. Neuchâtel, Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé. Cosnier, J., Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. 1987. Décrire la conversation. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Cosnier, J. 1989.Les gestes du dialogue, Video Quicktime 10 mn, ARCI-Via Communication Cosnier, J. 2007. Le corps et l'interaction. In Chabrol, C., Orly-Louis, I. (eds), Interactions communicatives , Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 91-95. Cienki, A., Müller, C., eds. 2008. Metaphor and Gesture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins. Esposito, A., Natale, A., Duncan, S. , McNeill D., Quek F. 2003. Relazioni tra le pause nel parlato e le pause nei gesti: una ipotesi di sincronizzazione. In Proceedings of the V Congresso Nazionale delle Sezione di Psicologia Sociale, Bari, Italy, 26-28 Settembre 2003. Gibbs, R. W. 2003. Embodied Experience and Linguistic Meaning. Brain and Language 84, 1-15. Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). The resilience of language. New York: Psychology Press. Goldin-Meadow, S. 2003. Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think. Cambridge, Mass.: Bellknap Press. Guidetti, M. 2006. Aspects pragmatiques de la communication gestuelle et verbale chez le jeune enfant : une comparaison France/Côte d´Ivoire. Enfance n° 2, 169-177. Iverson, J. M., Tencer H. L., Lany, J., Goldin-Meadow, S. 2000. The Relation between gesture and speech in congenitally blind and sighted language learners. Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour 24 (2), 105-130 Kendon, A. 1986. Some reasons for studying gesture. Semiotica, 62 – 1/2, 3-28. Kendon, A. 1992a. Some recent work from Italy on quotable gestures ('emblems'). Journal of Linguistic Anthropology Vol. 2 (1), pp. 77-93. Kendon, A. 1992b. Geography of Gesture. Semiotica, 90 - 3/4, 225-221. Kendon, A. 1997. Gesture. Annual Review of Anthropology 22, 109-128. Kendon, A. 2004. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kipp, M. 2008. Spatiotemporal coding in ANVIL. In Proceedings on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Levinson, S. C. 1996. Language and Space. Annual Review of Anthropology 25, 353-382. Martinet, A. 1970. Eléments de linguistique générale. Paris: A. Colin. McNeill, D., Cassel, J., McCullough K.-E. 1994. Communicative effects of speech mismatched gestures. Research on Language and Social Interaction 27: 223-37. McGurk, H., MacDonald, J. 1976. Hearing lips and Seeing Voices. Nature vol. 264, December 23/30, 746-748. McNeill, D. 1985. So you Think Gestures Are Nonvebal ? Psychological Review, 92, 350-371. McNeill, D. 1995. Hand and Mind. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. McNeill, D. 2005. Gesture and Thought. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Müller, C. 2008. What gestures reveal about the nature of metaphor. . In Cienki, A., Müller, C., eds. 2008. Metaphor and Gesture, 219-245. Őzyürek, A., Allen, S., Furman, R., Kita, S., Brown, A., Ishizuka, T. 2008. Development of Cross-Linguistic Variation in Speech and Gesture: Motion Events in English and Turkish. Developmental Psychology vol. 44, 4, 1040-1054. Pavelin, B. 2002a. Le Geste à la parole. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Pavelin, B. 2002b. Statut et rôle du mouvement dans la communication orale en face-a-face. In Renard, R. ed., La Phonétique verbotonale, Tome 2. Bruxelles, Bélgique : Editions des Boeck Université, 71-87. Parril, F. 2008. Form, meaning and convention : A comparison of a metaphoric gesture with an emblem. In Cienki, A., Müller, C., eds. 2008. Metaphor and Gesture, 195-217. Scherer, K. R., Ekman, P. 1982. Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behaviour Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. York, T. 2006. Embodiment and Iconicity in Birth Narratives. Texas Linguistic Forum 49, 138-148.

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Figure 11

1

For more detailed presentation of the annotation symbols cf. Pavelin 2002: 17-18, 181-202

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Figure 2

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The translation of the handwriting and the interpretation of the extract from the transcription table of DRAMATIZATION № 7, TEST GROUP, APPROXIMATELY 35 SEC, INTERACTANTS : NIKŠA AND HRVOJE (10 YEARS OLD BOYS), TEACHER (FEMALE), MIRTA AND NADA (10 YEARS OLD GIRLS) INTERVENE SITTING IN THE AUDIENCE, TOPIC : ROLE PLAYING INVITATION TO THE CINEMA IN THE FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM, 21 INTERVENTIONS : NIKŠA 8, HRVOJE 3, TEACHER 8, MIRTA 1, NADA 1 THE VIEW OF THE INITIAL POSTUROPROXEMIC SITUATION : THE TEACHER (ENS) AND THE TWO BOYS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE CLASS, THE TWO GIRLS SITTING IN THE AUDIENCE 1.1. ( № OF THE TIME UNIT, № OF THE INTERVENTION) NIKŠA: “TU TELEPHONES A TON AMI?” underneath : THE INTONATIONAL CURVE : rising, PERCEPTIBLE BODY MOVEMENT : HEAD turning to Hrvoje, EYES/EYEBROWS : upward side look to the teacher, moves to Hrvoje, and looks downwards, MOUTH : smiling by the end of the utterance, looking downwards, ARMS/HANDS/FINGERS, BUST ORIENTATION : first oriented to the teacher, giving her a sheet of paper, then turning to Hrvoje, hands put together, moving them apart by the end of the utterance 2.2. A (the second time unit, the second intervention) the TEACHER is speaking to Nikša : “ NON, NON, NON. TU TELEPHONES. TU TELEPHONES A HRVOJE.” Again, the spoken utterance is presented with the accompanying intonational curve and perceptible body movements. At the same time in 2.2.B Nikša reacts nonverbally to the teacher´s intervention. In 3.3. Nikša says / a h a/, the vocalization meaning ˝I get it˝.

Figure 3 3. The teacher is speaking, head down, looking at the sheet of paper in her right hand, shaking up and down her left hand palm up: “FOR EXAMPLE. CIRCLE THE WRIGHT ANSWER”. Then her left hand forms cup beating by up and down movements on the words “Mark” and “says” and hand opening and stopping on the word “Nicole”: “MARK SAYS TO NICOLE”. Then the teacher shifts the sheet of paper to her left hand, raises her head and her eyebrows up, looks at the audience.

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Figure 4 Come here !

Figure 5 Come here.

Figure 6 It´s your turn !

Figure 7 The Parliament was surrounded by the police forces

Figure 8 The two towers dominate the view on the village.

Figure 9 She fell sick.

Figure 11

Figure 12 Teacher to her students, before explaining a new word : For example!

Figure 10 It´s a small house for camping. (The teacher is explaining the word tent.)

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