Speech and Gesture Alignment in Expressing Vague Reference in Expository Monologue and Dialogue in Russian
Type: article
Abstract: The current study addresses the problem of vague reference construal in expository discourse modulated by different discourse regimes, monologue and dialogue.Vague reference is viewed as a discourse category which shapes the referents or the path towards referents, which can be explored in different communicative modes, here in speech and manual gesture.The paper reports the results of two experiments which test speech and gesture alignment in expressing vague reference in monologues and dialogues in Russian featuring different types of extraneous load in expository discourse.We hypothesize that higher extraneous load of monologues could modulate the use of alignment patterns of vague reference cues in speech and of functional gestures.The results based on the 116-minute long subcorpora reveal that while approximators prevail in both discourse regimes, the ratio of placeholders is significantly higher in dialogues.The use of gestures synchronized with placeholders and approximators manifests an increase in pragmatic gestures in dialogue, while in monologue the ratio of representational gestures is higher.Overall, the distinctions of extraneous cognitive load in vague reference construal in monologue and dialogue are attributed to both speech and co-speech gesture distributions.
Source: CyberLeninK (CyberLeninka)
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223530604