Embodied constructions. Pointing gestures anchoring pragmatic, semantic, discursive and syntactic structures

This paper explores the use of pointing gestures by speakers during Q&A-sessions at the Flemish Parliament. On the background of a cognitive-linguistic approach to processes of meaning making, our focus on pointing gestures (Fricke 2002, 2003, 2007, 2014) is inspired by the frame-based account of gesture pragmatics, as recently developed by Mittelberg (2017, 2019). In this view, co-speech gestures are characterized as metonymically structured in two respects (Mittelberg & Waugh 2009, 2014). In the case of pointing gestures, first, based on a contiguous relationship, the gestured sign stands for the signed target. Second, the pointing gesture (along with its metonymically designated target) may metonymically refer to either another element in the encompassing frame or to the frame as a whole. The present paper reports on the analysis of a corpus of two plenary Q/A-sessions in the Flemish Parliament, in which we identified several cross-modal instances of the ‘basic physical action frame’ (COMMUNICATIVE) TRANSFER (Mittelberg 2017:215; Bressem & Müller 2014; Müller 2017). In each of these instances, a semantic role – determined by either the interactional setting of the usage event or by the argument structure of a lexical element (verb, adjective, noun) - is realized through the use of a pointing gesture. Our claim then is that the pointing gesture in each of these instances operates as a material (bodily) anchor (Hutchins 2005) through which the entire usage event gets aligned into a coherent interpretation. In the analysis of five examples from our dataset (infra, our translation), we demonstrate how pointing gestures may affect different levels of the process of meaning making, up to the realization of a fully embodied ditransitive construction. (1) …resources that go back to Flanders… (2) …those trade agreements are no jokes for Europe… (3) …because I think that is a shared concern… (4) …because (..) government investments also have a positive effect… (5) …a lot of questions have been asked here… The underlined elements mark co-occurrence with a pointing gesture. In (1)-(2) the speakers point to themselves thus realizing a simultaneous cross-modal blend of both the source (the speaker as part of the community) and the target (the community as a whole) of this metonymy. In these cases the pointing gesture clearly has an impact on the semantic structure of these utterances. In (3) the speaker points at herself and the previous speaker thus identifying two referents of the argument structure of the underlying verb ‘share’, which factors into the specific pragmatics of this utterance. In (4), the speaker realizes a deictic parenthesis after the conjunction ‘because’, as he disrupts the prosodic structure with a pause during which he points to the previous speaker before resuming the phrase on the same prosodic level. The sequence from verbal to gestural and back to verbal level provides a clear illustration of a multimodal realization of the parenthesis construction, which reads along the lines of “as already mentioned by this colleague”. Here, the pointing gesture has a clear impact on both the discursive and pragmatic organization of the usage event. Finally, in (5) the speaker uses both hands to point at himself, thus indicating that all questions have been asked to him. In doing so, the gesture clearly impacts the syntactic organization of the argument structure as it provides a perfect realization of a multimodal ditransitive construction. 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