Abstract
An apparent correspondence between speech-accompanying gestures and the structure of information in discourse has previously been addressed (Kendon 2004; Jannedy & Mendoza-Denton 2005). However, due to the lack of gesture-annotated multimodal corpora, attempts to carry out a quantitative analysis of the relationship between gesture and information structure have been rather scarce.
Ebert and colleagues (2011) investigated the temporal alignment of gestures, intonation peaks and focus in German and found that the gesture-phrase peaks systematically precede the focal expressions. In my poster, I will present the outcomes of a study of how the speech-accompanying gestures align with the sentence focus and intonation in English.
In English, one might expect a similar pattern as in German. In order to shed light on the role of gesture in focus marking in English a study is being carried out using conversational material from the AMI-meeting corpus (Carletta 2006).
The AMI-meeting corpus is a freely available resource consisting of more than 100 hours of English conversations recorded during business meetings. The corpus has already been annotated for gestures and a number of other non-verbal as well as discourse features.
Yet, for the purposes of my analysis further annotation is being provided (especially annotation relating to information structure and prosody. The analysis will focus on the temporal co-occurrence of the gesture phrases peaks (Kendon 2004), the focal information units (Van Valin 2005) and pitch accents (Leohr 2004).
Results of this analysis will be compared with the findings from German (Ebert et al. 2004). Furthermore, this study will serve as a starting point for a subsequent cross-linguistic comparison of the focus marking using gestures that will include Slavic languages (Czech and Russian), i. e. languages with more flexible word order than the Germanic languages, and thus with a wider repertoire of the syntactic means of focus marking.