Co-speech gestures accompanying use of conditionals and modals
Eve Sweetser, Professor
Linguistics
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
It has long been known that co-speech gesture reveals aspects of on-line cognition which may not be revealed in speech itself. This project investigates the usage of gestures accompanying modals (e.g. CAN, MUST, MAY, SHOULD) and conditionals (IF-clauses), to see what understandings of modality and conditional relationships are reflected in gesture. For example, we hypothesize that speakers may gesturally indicate creation of "imaginary spaces" (see Fauconnier's Mental Spaces theory) as they use conditionals; and they may gesturally reflect their models of coercion, permission and possibility in their gestures accompanying modal verbs. Sweetser and others have developed such semantic models - which can now be examined in the light of new data.
Mark Turner and Francis Steen have given us access, via their Red Hen database, to a very large corpus of captioned television data. Since it is captioned, it is searchable by linguistic forms (e.g. IF, MUST) - it is very hard to search video data directly. It has thus been possible to locate large numbers of examples of these common words, and examine gestural patterns accompanying them.
Initial results, on 700 examples of English IF-conditionals from talk-show date, were presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in July 2015, and further results in 2017 at the International Multimodal Communication Conference - the basic hypotheses of the project are being confirmed. The next phase involves both gathering more data, and refining analyses of the gesture structures in the date currently being examined.
Role: The research apprentice will use Red Hen's search capabilities to locate examples in this corpus, and assist in developing a database and in doing data-analysis. This apprentice can in the process learn a great deal about lexical and constructional semantics and about analysis of co-speech gesture.
Qualifications: Must have basic web-usage and searching experience - and at least basic spread-sheet skills. Cognitive linguistics experience is not required but there'll be extra reading needed at the start if you have not taken a CogLing class.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Related website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~sweetser/