Aspectuality across Languages: Event construal in speech and gesture

Description

The book provides a nuanced, multimodal perspective on how people express events via certain grammatical forms of verbs in speech and certain qualities of movement in manual gestures. The volume is the outcome of an international project that involved three teams: one each from France, Germany, and Russia, including scholars from the Netherlands and the United States. Aspect and gesture use are studied in three Indo-European languages, i.e. French, German, and Russian. The book also summarizes the main points and arguments from French, German, and Russian works on aspect in relation to tense, bringing these historical traditions together for an English-speaking reading audience. The work rekindles some fundamental theorizing about events and aspect, reinvigorating it in a new light with the use of recent theorizing from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, as well as new research methods applied to new data from actual spoken, interactive language use. It illustrates the value of researching the variably multimodal nature of communication – as well as theoretical issues in connection with thinking for speaking and mental simulation – from an empirical point of view. Aspectuality across Languages Editorial page Title page LCC and copyright page Table of contents Editors and contributors Acknowledgments List of tables and figures Preface Introduction: Aspect and event structure as topics in linguistic and psychological research (Cienki, Iriskhanova) 1. Introduction 2. Semantics approached from the perspective of conceptualization and mental simulation 3. Beyond language – visible action expressing conceptualization 4. The main research questions Chapter 1. Aspect through the lens of event construal 1. On events and aspect 1.1 Events: An historical and philosophical overview 1.2 Aspect across traditions: Main lines of research (Iriskhanova, Morgenstern, Müller, Richter) 2. Background on talk-based multimodal communication 2.1 Thinking for speaking and gesturing (Cienki) 2.2 Gestures as movement 2.3 Summing up: Aspect as amodal or as modality-dependent (Boutet, Morgenstern, Cienki) Chapter 2. Researching aspect in multimodal communication: Consequences for data and methods 1. Introduction (Cienki) 2. The choice of data and method of elicitation for the production studies (Cienki, Becker) 3. Categories used for the analysis of event construal in spoken language (Cienki) 4. Categories used for the analysis of event construal in gesture 4.1 Features for the gesture phases: Determining the unit of analysis (Boutet, Müller) 4.2 Pulse of effort as a kinesiological criterion (Boutet) 4.3 Bounded and unbounded schemas (Boutet, Müller) 5. Bringing it all together: Annotation and coding (Boutet, Morgenstern) 5.1 Choice of controlled vocabulary 5.2 Choice of the type of template and hierarchy Chapter 3. Speakers’ verbal expression of event construal: Quantitative and qualitative analyses 1. Introduction: Construal of events in spoken narrative (Iriskhanova) 1.1 Basic features of narrative discourse 1.2 Basic features of spoken narratives 1.3 Some preliminary remarks on the textual data 2. The French speakers’ verbal expression of event construal (Morgenstern, Boutet, Debras) 2.1 Background on the uses of tenses in narratives 2.2 Quantitative analyses 2.3 Qualitative analyses 2.4 Concluding remarks 3. The German speakers’ verbal expression of event construal (Müller) 3.1 Introduction: Specifics of aspectual event construal in tense forms in spoken German 3.2 Quantitative analyses: Use of Präteritum and Perfekt in spoken German as compared to French use of imparfait and passé composé 3.3 Qualitative analyses: The use of Präteritum and Perfekt in spoken German 3.4 Discussion 4. The Russian speakers’ verbal expression of event construal (Denisova, Iriskhanova) 4.1 Introducing general specifics of tense and aspect use in spoken Russian narratives 4.2 Quantitative analysis: General results for Russian verbs 4.3 Qualitative analyses of Russian verbs 4.4 Concluding remarks 5. Summary (Iriskhanova) Chapter 4. Speakers’ gestural expression of event construal: Quantitative and qualitative analyses 1. Introduction (Boutet, Morgenstern, Cienki) 1.1 Choice of the coding protocol for gesture analysis 1.2 Inter-coder reliability 1.3 Category-specific particularities 1.4 Summing up 2. The French speakers’ gestural expression of event construal (Boutet, Morgenstern) 2.1 Introduction: Hypothesis for French 2.2 Boundary schemas in French gestures 2.3 Conclusion 3. German (Müller) 3.1 Introduction: Hypothesis for German 3.2 Results of boundary schema analysis for German 3.3 Discussion: German as a complex case 4. Russian (Denisova, Iriskhanova, Cienki) 4.1 Introduction: Hypothesis for Russian 4.2 Results of boundary schema analysis for Russian 4.3 Conclusion 5. Summary (Cienki, Müller) Chapter 5. Looking ahead: Kinesiological analysis (Boutet, Morgenstern, Cienki) 1. Initial main concepts 1.1 Segments 1.2 Degrees of freedom 2. A kinesiological view of gesture 2.1 Intrinsically multiple frames of reference 2.2 A geometry associated with space 2.3 Dynamics 3. Movement (motor) control from a kinesiological perspective 3.1 Velocity in relation to shape 3.2 The opposition of phase law 3.3 The principle of isochrony 3.4 Codman’s paradox 3.5 Types of motion transfer 3.6 Discussion 4. Case study: Kinesiological analysis of the French gesture data 4.1 Propagation flow and perfectivity 4.2 Number and type of segments and perfectivity 4.3 Qualitative analyses 5. Discussion Chapter 6. Comprehension of event construal from multimodal communication (Becker, Gonzalez-Marquez) 1. Approaches in psychology 1.1 Psychology as a way of knowing 1.2 Theories in cognitive psychology 2. Background to the comprehension experiment 2.1 Introduction to the comprehension experiment 2.2 Hypotheses 3. Methods 3.1 Participants 3.2 Materials 3.3 Procedure 4. Results 4.1 Reporting of results 4.2 French 4.3 German 4.4 Russian 4.5 Interim summary 4.6 Combined analyses 5. Discussion of combined analyses 6. Conclusion 7. Afterword: The need for interdisciplinary collaboration Conclusion: Aspectuality and the expression of event construal as variably multimodal (Iriskhanova, Cienki) References Appendix A. The two-part consent form used in the production study, which was translated into French, German, and Russian Consent form Your agreement for use of the recording Appendix B. The conversation prompts as provided in each language French German Russian Appendix C. Illustration of the categories used for controlled vocabulary in ELAN for verb coding, taking the Russian verbal data as an example Appendix D. Transliteration conventions used for Russian (Cyrillic to Latin alphabet) Name index Subject index