Conference article

Up; down; in and out: Following the Path in speech and gesture in Danish and Italian

Bjørn Wessel-Tolvig
Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

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Published in: Proceedings from the 1st European Symposium on Multimodal Communication University of Malta; Valletta; October 17-18; 2013

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 101:9, p. 73-81

NEALT Proceedings Series 21:9, p. 73-81

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Published: 2014-06-24

ISBN: 978-91-7519-266-6

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

This paper investigates cross-linguistic speech-gesture differences in a ‘prototypical’ satellite framed language (Danish) and a language with split system possibilities for lexicalization (Italian). It is often claimed that languages have specific inventories for lexicalizing motion which are reflected in gestural repertoires. But how are gestures expressed in a language that easily encodes PATH of motion either in verb roots or in satellites? Results from Danish and Italian show cross-linguistic differences in speech and gesture patterns and suggest that gesture production is more a result of the speakers’ on-line utterance conceptualization processes rather than language-specific cognitive diversity.

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