Abstract
Cognitive linguistics (CL) has, in recent years, seen an increase in appeals to include multiple modalities in language analyses. While individual studies have incorporated gesture, gaze, facial expression, and prosody, among other modalities, CL has yet to completely embrace the systematic analysis of face-to-face interaction. Here, I present an investigation of five aspect-marking periphrastic constructions in North American English. Using naturalistic interactional data (n=250) from the Red Hen archive, this study establishes a multimodal profile for auxiliary constructions headed by one of five highly aspectualized verbs: continue, keep, start, stop, and quit, as in The jackpot continued to grow and He quit smoking. Results show that gesture timing, the structure of the gesture stroke, and gesture movement type, are variables that iconically and differentially represent distinctive aspectual conceptualizations. This study enhances our understanding of aspectual representation in co-speech gesture and informs the ongoing debate within CL and construction grammar circles of what constitutes conventionalization, or what constitutes a construction (mono- or multimodal).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sally Rice for valuable feedback throughout this project. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Society for Gesture Studies (San Diego, 2014), International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Edmonton, 2013), and Association Francaise de Linguistique Cognitive (Lille, 2013), and I am grateful to those audiences for their responses. I would also like to thank three anonymous Cognitive Linguistics reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by a J. A. Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (#767-2012-2405) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). I also gratefully acknowledge the Killam Trust for their assistance.
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