Abstrakt
In our paper, we examine how the way verbs structure events corresponds with formal properties of co-speech gestures in English and Czech spontaneous spoken production. We test the hypothesis that in languages that frame eventuality primarily in an analytic manner using complex verbal constructions and syntactic constructions expressing distinct temporal meanings (e.g.
English), there is a tendency of these constructions to be accompanied by more complex (as for the number of gestural components and/or duration of movement) gestures than languages that express eventuality distinctions using affixes within synthetic verb forms (e.g. Czech).This tendency has been attested cross-linguistically for motion events (e.g. Özyürek et al., 2005) - we predict that it would be found beyond the verbs of motion too.