Towards a speech–gesture profile of pragmatic markers: The case of “you know”

Our study introduces a novel approach for examining the functional relationship between the pragmatic marker “you know” and its co-occurring gestures. It draws on 401 instances of “you know” identified in the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus. Based on the speech patterns in the data, a framework of six functions of “you know” was established (i.e., ‘editing’, ‘introducing’, ‘inviting inferences’, ‘elaborating’, ‘marking reported speech’, ‘approximating’). 74 gestures that primarily co-occur with “you know” were selected for analysis based on a functional framework mainly adopted from Kendon (2004): pragmatic, referential, beat and deictic gestures. The main results show that three of the functions (i.e., ‘editing’, ‘introducing’ and ‘elaborating’) account for 81% of the whole dataset, and share a similar function of emphasizing the intention of presenting further information. In addition, they tend to co-occur with the pragmatic gestures that embody a similar pragmatic function. The results illustrate the functional coordination between pragmatic markers and gestures, and demonstrate the value of using a multimodal corpus pragmatic approach for exploring the patterns of speech and gesture, and for developing a more nuanced profile of pragmatic markers that, in the history of pragmatics, have largely been described on the sole basis of their speech instantiation