Resumen de Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negationin French and Its Organisation with Speech
Simon Harrison, Pierre Larrivée
In this paper, we present novel observations indicating that the syntaxof clause negation in French constrains how speakers perform a specific gestural form associated with negation. As previously demonstrated for English (Harrison 2010), the Palm-Down-Horizontal-Across (PDA) gesture that we study tends to be coordinated with the main propositional negator and then held in space with theproceeding clause-mate elements. This tendency is confirmed by the French data from an audiovisual corpus of naturalistic conversations. These new data show that the PDA gesture stroke starts with the vocal marker of negation in French as well. This invites further investigation into the relation between propositional structureand structural aspects of gestures as a full component of linguistic organisation.
