Last morning of #ICCG10, Alan Cienki will be speaking about multimodality and the analyses if utterances. I hear he might even have an example from a sign language in there 🤞
Cienki: where is your data coming from? people using language? or an old white man in an armchair looking at a book? 🔥🔥🔥 there is a dominant and implicit bias toward written language in linguistics that we need to cast off #ICCG10
Cienki: after all, Langacker’s definition of the usage event includes full contextual understanding, full phonetic detail, in conceptualization and expression #ICCG10
Cienki: McNeill champions the (Vegotskyian) view that speech and gesture arise from the same idea unit, and so co-speech gesture provides a window into conceptualization #ICCG10
Cienki: one way that this has been taken up in usage-based cognitive linguistics is that gesture inherently involves, and thus represents, viewpoint, whether character (1st person) or observer (3rd person) #ICCG10
Cienki: gestures that depict or represent are also relevant for metaphor and mytonymy, whether enacting, holding, tracing, or embodying (a la Müller), we are necessarily selecting part of an image to represent the whole #ICCG10
Cienki: gesture is furthermore linked to traditionally linguistic constructs such as transitivity encoding in syntax (such as the familiar spray- or give-alternations in English)— analysis of this is facilitated by the UCLA Broadcast NewsScape distributed by @redhenlab #ICCG10
Cienki: Looking at gesture might make us rethink grammatical theory, from a multimodal perspective. such a perspective is informed by interactive and dynamic language use as our primary data (see the recent special issue in Linguistics Vanguard!) #ICCG10
Cienki: frequency and variability and apparent idiosyncracy of gesture all pose potentia issues, which can perhaps be addressed by viewing constructions as having prototype and graded structure, where gestures are more/less salient or more/less frequent #ICCG10
Cienki: btw these gradience issues apply to phonemes, words, and syntactic constructions too! #ICCG10
Cienki: perhaps the utterance is the relevant level of description for spoken language and co-speech gesture. Kendon counts utterances as ensembles of action that are counted as attempts to “give” information, which can be audible or visible #ICCG10
Cienki: my proposal is that utterances are constructed out of one or more “effort units” typicall involving one “idea unit”, whether an intonational or gestural phrase as we already know it #ICCG10
Cienki: in an Utterance Construction Grammar (UCxG), we can view gestures with the emic/etic tools to view the range of possible gestural expressions against that which is actually used in an actual utterance (such as “so what” or even “tadaa” versions of shrugs) 🤷♂️ #ICCG10
Cienki: in UCxG some cxns are more gesture attracting, others more gesture repelling, which we might make sense of through behaviors that attract and manage attention #ICCG10
Cienki: after all, this follows from the idea that behaviors that repeatedly occur in usage events with certain functions become more entrenched #ICCG10
