Co-speech gesticulation accompanying verbs of motion in Russian

Thus, the direction of movement of a falling object may affect the trajectory of the gesture accompanying a construction expressing a falling event. The given examples demonstrate the variability of gestures accompanying Russian motion verbs in terms of this parameter of gesture.

5.2.6. Spatial adverbs

Then we looked at the constructions of verbs of motion with spatial adverbs, for which we have previously seen patterns regarding their gestural accompaniment.

As seen in Figures 19a and 19b, the constructions with a spatial adverb vniz are accompanied by a downward gesture. Figures 20a and 20b, Figures 21a and 21b illustrate that constructions with a spatial adverb vverkh are accompanied by an upward gesture.

Further, Figures 22a and 22b, Figures 23a and 23b show how constructions with a spatial adverb mimo can be accompanied by a gesture. As seen, the orientation of the active organ with respect to the speaker's diaphragm is influenced by whether the speaker is talking about him/herself or about the other person's moving.

Finally, Figure 24 shows a typical gesture of a structure containing a spatial adverb navstrechu: the movement of both hands towards each other.

In sum, the presence of spatial adverbs influences the character of the accompanying gesticulation of verbs of motion (regardless of whether they are reproduced from the point of view of the character or the observer, and regardless of the semantics of the root or prefix).

5.2.7. Summary

After conducting a qualitative analysis based on MURCO and NewsScape, we confirmed the following gestural patterns for the verb prefixes: the prefixed verbs containing prefix pod- are characterized by a gesture directed upwards the prefixed verbs containing prefix s- are accompanied by a gesture directed downwards, and the prefixed verbs containing prefix u- are characterized by a gesture directed from the speaker (we can make conclusions on gestural accompaniment of the prefixed verbs only for the examples with verbs of motion, where the meaning of the prefix includes the semantic component “upward motion”, “downward motion”, “self”).

We also showed that the palm configuration of gestures accompanying verbs of motion may also express the shape or size of the object to be moved (when the gesture is performed from the perspective of the character).

Furthermore, we validated that the presence of an explicitly stated endpoint affects the trajectory of gestures accompanying verbs in Russian.

We also defined that the presence of spatial adverbs influences the character of the accompanying gesticulation of verbs of motion (regardless of whether they are reproduced from the point of view of the character or the observer, and regardless of the semantics of the root or prefix).

To sum up, we showed that the semantics of the verb root in Russian may influence whether the gesture is performed from the point of view of observer or from the point of view of character. Then, the presence of verb arguments with different semantic roles affects the character of the gesture. Spatial adverbs and prepositions influence the character of gesticulation and can overlap the patterns allocated for prefixes and roots. The general conclusion of our study is that the character of the accompanying gesticulation for verbs of motion in Russian is context determined.

6. Discussion and conclusions

6.1 Discussion of findings

There are some gestural patterns of prefixes and verbal roots identified by E. Grishina and confirmed by our study, which are related to the presence in these roots and prefixes of such semantic components as “downward movement”, “upward movement”, component “self” and others (detailed conclusions are given at the end of each section). Gesticulation is also affected by the presence of verb arguments that express the starting and ending point. Sometimes the Manner component of a gesture can be expressed in the gesture, but this does not happen so often.

It was difficult to look for such patterns in corpora, because in each specific context different verb arguments may appear, which will affect the character of gesture, so it is complicated to identify some common patterns in such material. In sum, we rather focused on examples that support the finding that the location of the endpoint influences the character of the accompanying gesticulation in different contexts. It is also problematic to work with corpora in general, because gestures mostly are not marked up, and we have to rewatch a lot of videos. The annotation of each corpus did not comply with the demands of our study, and it was necessary to mark up our database manually. Besides, as it turned out, in most of the contexts of corpus material (television programs and reports) the verbs we are interested in occurred in figurative meanings.

Further, the patterns identified in the video taken as part of the experiment may be affected by the environment of the experiment (or the presence of some details in the stimulus video: in the video clips we analyzed, most of the iconic gestures were shifted to the image of pears).

In sup, we obtained that the semantics of the verb root in Russian may influence whether the gesture is performed from the point of view of observer or from the point of view of character. In these two situations, the presence of verb arguments with different semantic roles affects the character of the gesture. This assumption should be verified by comparing it with the accompanying gesticulation of motion verbs of native speakers of other languages. The presence of spatial adverbs and prepositions influences the character of gesticulation and can overlap the patterns allocated for prefixes and roots.

The article on cognitive linguistics [Kok, Cienki 2017] expresses the following idea: language comprehension in interaction constructs semantic representations and involves the dynamic integration of verbal and gestural cues. In a similar manner, co-speech gestures that accompany motion verbs in Russian may play a role to complete understanding of the sentence, and the character of the gesture may depend on the context of the sentence.

The general conclusion of our study is that the character of the accompanying gesticulation for verbs of motion in Russian is context-driven.

6.2. Russian and RSL

It is interesting to compare the results of our study with the information on how the components of a motion event are expressed in Russian Sign Language. The components of the motion event described by L. Talmy are also applicable to sign language, which also expresses the meaning of the starting and ending point, trajectory, and manner of motion.

We will consider on an example of a falling event how the components of the motion event can be marked in RSL [Kuseva, in press]. Russian Sign Language demonstrates a detailed categorization of the falling event by classifying the situation according to a number of parameters. The type of a falling subject is expressed by the shape of a hand, a top-down falling is characterized by a top-down gesture trajectory, and other types of falling are expressed by the gesture of “arc” trajectory. The initial and endpoint of the falling object in Russian Sign Language is encoded through the direction of the gesture movement (orientation along axes).

It turns out that in Russian Sign Language and in spoken Russian some components of the motion event are encoded in a similar way relative to the parameters of the gesture. The initial and endpoints are related to the orientation of the gesture along the communicative axes. Verbs with the semantic component “downward movement” at their root will be accompanied by top-down gestures in Russian Sign Language and in spoken Russian. In Russian, co-speech gestures that brat'/-birat' and klast'/-kladyvat' are characterized by an “object agreement”, expressed in that the palm configuration expresses the shape or size of the object being moved, which looks similar to Russian Sign Language where the falling objects are expressed by the shape of the hand.

So, RSL and Russian encode some components of the motion event in a similar way. There are some general patterns of conceptualization of the elements of the event, and those patterns in gestures show that speakers of different languages may represent events in mind in a similar way.

6.3. Implications of research

We showed that the character of gesture is influenced by the presence of certain verb arguments with different semantic roles and by the semantics of verbal root and prefix. The findings complement the existing general picture on the gestural profiles of Russian verbs. The following results are significant for research in the field of gesture linguistics, an area that is understudied in the existing scientific literature for the Russian language.

The obtained results help researchers to deeply understand the character of co-speech gestures that accompany motion verbs with a semantic component of root “trajectory” and “downward movement”. We identified the following gestural patterns of prefixes: the upward orientation of verbs of motion with prefix za-, the orientation of gesture accompanying the verb with prefix so- towards the speaker, and the orientation of verbs of motion with the s- prefix in the direction “out of the gesture space”. The trajectory of gesture accompanying verbs having in their roots a semantic component “downward movement” is influenced by a verb argument that denotes the ending point at which the moving object appears after the motion event. The orientation of gestures accompanying verbs with the semantic component “trajectory” in verbal root towards the horizontal axis depends on where the starting and ending point is from the observer's point of view.

6.4. Limitations of study

There are several limitations to this study that should be mentioned. The first limitation is that we were able to analyze only some of the spacial adverbs and prepositions, and the second one is that we did not have sufficient examples for each verb root.

Firstly, we have defined gestural patterns not for all spatial adverbs of the Russian language, as (obviously) not all adverbs occurred in our sample. Of course, we could not conclude on the construction with a preposition based on one occurrence. However, we have managed to identify some common patterns and show that the presence of spatial adverbs in a construction with a motion verb affects the character of gesture. Also, it turned out that the character of gestures is influenced by the presence of verb arguments with different semantic roles connected with a motion event.

Further, despite the use of several corpora for data analysis, we did not have enough examples to describe each of the verbal roots of Russian with a semantic component of motion. We managed to identify patterns for several verb pairs, which were frequent in our sample, but it turned out that even within one verbal root the character of a gesture very much depends on the context of the whole sentence. We attempted to look at how the specific contexts affects the character of gesticulation, not to consider each verb separately.

These limitations of the study can be solved by conducting an experiment aimed at defining a gestural pattern for a particular construction so that there would be enough data to describe the gestural accompaniment.

In our database, only half of the occurrences with verbs of motion were accompanied by gestures. In general, the description of gestural patterns is accurate for our database with statistically correct data distribution. However, in the free speech, the character of gesturing can be influenced by many other factors, and the gestural pattern may not be as clear as our data show.

6.5. Future research

Our work expands the understanding of how verbs of motion in Russian are accompanied by co-speech gestures. We confirmed some of Elena Grishina's findings and supplemented the paradigm by describing some specific examples.

Our conclusions can be used to compile several experiments to examine gestural patterns for certain constructions with motion verbs that have not been fully investigated in this work due to an insufficient number of examples (caused motion, verbs of falling, describing the expression of Manner, etc.).

As mentioned before, many cross-linguistic works that focus on the co-speech gestures accompanying motion events examine the use of gestures by children (Цzyьrek, Kita, et al 2008). It was proved that the coding of motion emerges earlier in speech than in gesture, and the patterns in gestures represent differences in the way gestures are shaped by language over development as well as gradual changes toward language-specific processing of event components during expression. Our supplemental study of co-speech gestures accompanying Russian verbs of motion may serve as a basis for a cross-linguistic experiment to determine gestural patterns of children speaking Russian and to compare the results with data from other languages.

6.6. Conclusions

To conclude, this study examined the co-speech gesticulation accompanying of verbs of motion in Russian to determine gestural patterns for prefixed and non-prefixed verbs of motion in Russian. Quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out on the material of three corpora: Russian Multichannel Discourse Corpus, Multimedia Russian Corpus, NewsScape database. The hypothesis of our study, that the character of accompanying gesticulation for verbs of motion in Russian is determined not only by the semantics of the verbal root and the semantics of the verb prefix, has been confirmed. The main conclusion of our work is as follows: the character of accompanying gesticulation for verbs of motion in the Russian language is determined by the context. In each individual case the character of gesture may differ. The character of the gesture is influenced by the semantics of the verb root, the semantics of the verb prefix, the presence of spatial adverbs, the presence of the verb arguments. ?

References

1.Alibali, M. W., Kita, S., Bigelow, L. J., Wolfman, C. M., & Klein, S. M. (2001). Gesture plays a role in thinking for speaking. In the international Oralitй et Gestualitй colloquium (ORAGE) 2001 (pp. 407-410). Йditions L'Harmattan.

2.Allen, S., Цzyьrek, A., Kita, S., Brown, A., Furman, R., Ishizuka, T., & Fujii, M. (2007). Language-specific and universal influences in children's syntactic packaging of Mannerand path: A comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish. Cognition, 102(1), 16-48.

3.Arbuzova, I. (2011). Methodological aspects of teaching Russian spatial prepositions in a foreign audience [Metodicheskiye aspekty prepodavaniya russkikh prostranstvennykh predlogov v inostrannoy auditoria]. Vestnik Yaroslavskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im. PG Demidova. Seriya Gumanitarnyye nauki, (3), 129-133.

4.Avilova, N. S., & Akademii?a? nauk SSSR. Institut russkogo i?a?zyka. (1976). Verb aspect and semantics of the verb. [Vid glagola i semantika glagolnogo slova]. Nauka.

5.Becker, R. B., Boutet, D., Debras, C., Denisova, V., Gonzalez-Marquez, M., Morgenstern, A., ... & Richter, N. (2018). Aspectuality across Languages: Event construal in speech and gesture (Vol. 62). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

6.Becker, R., Cienki, A., Bennett, A., Cudina, C., Debras, C., Fleischer, Z., ... & Zarcone, A. (2011). Aktionsarten, speech and gesture. Proceedings of the GESPIN, 3-5.

7.Bressem, J. (2013). 20th century: empirical research of body, language, and communication. Body-Language-Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, eds C. Mьller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, SH Ladewig, D. McNeill, and S. Tessendorf (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter), 393-416.

8.Bressem, J. (2013). A linguistic perspective on the notation of form features in gestures. Body-language-communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, 1, 1079-1098.

9.Bressem, J., & Mьller, C. (2014). The family of Away gestures: Negation, refusal, and negative assessment. Body-language-communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, 2, 1592-1604.

10.Cienki, A., Iriskhanova, O., & Denisova, V. (2017). Grammatical aspect and gestural movement quality in Russian narrative discourse. Each Venture a New Beginning, 99-112.

11.Efron, D. (1941). Gesture, race and culture: A tentative study of the spatio-temporal and" linguistic" aspects of the gestural behavior of eastern Jews and southern Italians in New York City, living under similar as well as different environmental conditions (Vol. 9). Mouton.

12.Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 1(1), 49-98.

13.Ermolayeva N.A., Zueva A.V., Pereverzeva S.I., Slepak Ye.A., Shaymardanova A.R. (2018). Once again about the gestural profiles of language units: prefixes vs. prepositions [Yeshcho raz o zhestikulyatsionnykh profilyakh yazykovykh yedinits: pristavki vs. predlogi]. Proceedings from The Eighth International Conference on Cognitive Science, Svetlogorsk.

14.Fedorova, O. V., Kibrik, A. A., Korotaev, N. A., Litvinenko, A. O., & Nikolaeva, Y. V. (2016). Temporal coordination between gestural and speech units in multimodal communication [Vremennaya koordinatsiya mezhdu zhestovymi i rechevymi edinitsami v mul'timodal'noy kommunikatsii]. Komp'yuternaya lingvistika i intellektual'nye tekhnologii: Trudy mezhdunarodnoikonferentsii “Dialog 2016, 159-170.

Размещено на Allbest.ru