The "Iconic-Metaphoric-Deictic-Beat Quartet" revisited: are there really non-iconic co-speech gestures?

Abstract

The poster presents outcomes of a cross-linguistic multimodal corpus-based study of co-speech gestures and their relation to grammatical structure in English and Czech. The primary focus of our study was to explore links between grammatical and lexical-semantic features of constructions accompanied by gestures, and formal features of the co-speech gestures appearing during spontaneous speech production.

Thus, we explored iconic nature of co-speech gestures captured in a highly ecologically valid environment. Our data come from two comparable multimodal corpus samples of English and Czech interactions.

The main outcomes of the analysis were threefold: (i) there are significant associations between some lexical-semantic features and gestures' formal features and (ii) the character of these associations differs across languages. (iii) the iconic link has been observed across all types of gestures - not only in the "proper" iconics.