Two Interconnected Modes: Speech and Gesture

Linguistic research on co-speech gesture has established that gesture is a part of the speech production process, as gestures express semantic information, and can perform pragmatic functions, such as speech acts. Some studies have explored the idea that speech and gesture are two distinct modes that complement each other in their roles of the representation of semantic categories (McNeill 1985; Beattie and Holler 2002). This paper explored the interaction between the speech and gesture modes by examining a semantic category not considered by previous studies, shape. Two participants were recorded using audiovisual equipment speaking together for over an hour and a half in a naturally occurring conversation. Their gestures were identified and analyzed in relation to their cooccurring speech and with regard to criteria set forth by previous research. The gestures focused on were the iconic gestures, but the other gesture types, metaphoric, deictic, and beats, are also noted. There were few examples for the semantic categories of shape but those that did occur showed shape could be represented by the gesture aspect on a basis of importance to the narrative. As this research continues to support the idea of speech and gesture as two complementary modes divided in their work, it would do well to either expand this examination of shape or continue to analyze the other semantic categories not yet touched upon in other research.