The use of shared gesture space in co-operative meaning formation

Abstract

The present study focuses on strategies which speakers employ when gesturing in a shared articulatory space. Using data from English and Czech multimodal corpora of spontaneous business meetings, we conducted a qualitative analysis of gestural patterns based on two strategies: alignment and elaboration of gestures representing abstract/conceptual objects.

We show that speakers make use of both strategies in the context of co-operative meaning formation (with various pragmatic functions) and that the notions of alignment and elaboration provide useful analytic and descriptive tools for the study of human interaction from a multimodal perspective.

Keywords

• multimodal communication
• co-speech gestures
• gestural representation
• elaboration
• alignment