Grammatical Aspect and Gesture in French : reenacting past events

International audienceA multimodal approach to the expression of past events in oral interactions can shed light on how we can incorporate gestural representations of the subjects’ construal of event structure and correlate them with the verb forms used. Are the differences in the grammatical options that different languages provide for characterizing events also clear in the quality of the co-verbal gestures we use? In order to tackle this issue, we analyzed the grammatical aspects, tense and time as well as gestures used by pairs of students as they related past events in the framework of the Polimod project directed by Alan Cienki. In this paper, we will focus on French and on the verbal forms in the imparfait, and passé compose with their associated gestures.We transcribed the data in ELAN and annotated it using the coding scheme for aspect, time and tense and the boundary schemas developed in the project (Müller, 2000) differentiating what we called “bounded” and “unbounded” gestures. We then developed a more specific coding system to make finer grain analyses of the speakers’ co-verbal gestures. Rather than using the form features common in gesture research (McNeill 1992), our study is based on a physiologically-based kinesiological system (Boutet 2010). Our allocentric approach accounts for gesture units not in terms of their iconicity, but based on their formal characteristics and physiological constraints, which we call degrees of freedom. We coded the flow of the movement, the number of segments involved (fingers, hand, arm, forearm…), the configuration of the gesture and velocity.The results of the coding of the boundary schemas in the French data confirmed our hypothesis: there was a significant correlation between bounded gestures and the perfect tense (passé composé) as well as between unbounded gestures with the imperfect tense (imparfait). The aspectual difference between passé composé and imparfait seems to be embodied in the quality of the gestures used. Our first qualitative results using the detailed kinesiological coding system on 15% of the data indicates that the main feature that seems to differentiate the gestures associated to the imparfait to those associated to the passé composé is the flow of the movement. For the imparfait over 60% of the gestures are characterized by a proximal-distal flow (from the arm down to the fingers). Conversely, the gestures associated to the passé composé are distal-proximal (from the fingers up to the shoulder) in 80% of cases. This difference could be viewed as an embodiment of the link between imparfait and “ground” versus passé composé and “figure” (Langacker, 2001) and illustrates how research on speakers’ gestures can provide ways of studying their conceptualization of grammatical notions as they are speaking