Grammatical aspect, gesture, and mental simulation in Russian and French

International audienceThe analysis of speech and gesture provides insight into the mental representation of how an event occurred in time and how people communicate about it in a multimodal fashion. Duncan (2002) showed that the duration of gesture strokes tends to be longer and more agitated with event descriptions in the imperfective than with those using perfective verb forms. These gesture features were found in English, which marks progressive and non-progressive verb forms, and in Mandarin Chinese, which uses durative and perfective particles to characterize described events as ongoing or as complete. These findings were further confirmed for English by McNeill (2003) and Parrill et al. (2013). Even research including English as a second language (Becker et al. 2011) has shown that both the production and comprehension of verbs expressing different event types can be related to co-speech gesture features that reflect specific semantic aspectual categories going back to Vendler (1957, 1967).However, despite the universality of time as a factor in human existence, the languages of the world have a wide range of ways, via grammatical systems of verb tense and aspect, for characterizing how events play out in time. The present project considers Russian and French: two languages with key structural differences in expressing aspect (the temporal contour of events) through different kinds of grammatical structures. These languages mark an aspectual distinction grammatically in the past that is the same in one respect and very different in another: the two languages share a grammatical contrast between focusing on the internal structure of an event (imperfective aspect in Russian; imperfect tense in French) versus not doing so, but the latter is expressed with the perfective aspect in Russian and with different tenses in French such as the perfect (passé composé), pluperfect, historic present, or (in literary texts) the simple past.The data for this study were collected using the prompts from Becker et al. (2011) to elicit short personal narratives about events of different types. The prompts were translated into French and Russian. Ten pairs of university students served as participants with informed consent in Paris (native speakers of French) and ten pairs in Moscow (native speakers of Russian). The mean length of the conversations in each language was ten minutes. Verbs referring to past events were coded for tense and aspect as well as past or non-past time of events narrated, in order to capture any use of the historic present in the coding.How can we know if the use of different grammatical forms that are available in different languages relates to different kinds of thinking for speaking in those languages, and if so, in what ways? We cannot assume that the imperfective forms in one language necessarily mean the same thing as those in another language. However, we can see through gestural behavior if there is something similar or not in speakers’ experience when talking about events in the past using imperfect(ive) aspectual forms as opposed to other verb forms. In addition to the coding of the verb forms in the data, any gestures used in the same grammatical clauses as the verbs are being coded for their forms. However rather than using the form features now common in gesture research (popularized by McNeill 1992), which describe gestures in relation to the space in front of the speaker, our study is employing a physiologically-based kinesiological system introduced in Boutet (2010). The set of categories involved prioritize movement analysis, considering details of the segments of the hand and forearm moved, the form of movement in relation to the structure of the hand (e.g., flexion or extension), its flow from segments proximal to distal from the body or the reverse, changes in velocity, etc. These serve as micro-level categories that we can group for interpretation in terms of meso-level aspectual features familiar from the linguistic literature, e.g., durativity, punctuality, (un)boundedness (see, e.g., Müller 2000). In this way, the gestural representations of speakers’ construals of event structures can be correlated with the verb forms used (macro-level categories) and compared across the two languages.This form of gesture analysis, closely connected to the embodied properties of muscular exertion or effort (Laban & Lawrence 1974/1947), provides a window onto speakers’ dynamic construals of events (as McNeill 1992 suggests), building on the claims that gestures embody mentally simulated actions (Hostetter & Alibali 2008). By tying this gestural analysis to the tense/aspectual forms of the verbs in the clauses accompanied by gestures, the study shows how the analysis of gesture can provide solutions to semantic analysis in cognitive linguistics, where meaning is increasingly being studied in terms of mental simulation (e.g., Barsalou 2008; Bergen 2012; Gibbs 2006)