Abstract
Work by Russell Tomlin has shown that there is a close relationship between the syntactic subject of an utterance and the entity the speaker's attention is focused on while the utterance is being formulated, for descriptions of a simple event (Tomlin 1985, 1995, 1997). The experiment presented in this paper demonstrates that the same effect can be obtained for a more complex event, and that attention also impacts the spontaneous hand gestures produced along with speech. The paper shows that both syntactic subject and the information contained in gesture can be manipulated by changing which entity a speaker is focused on during utterance formulation. This pattern suggests that changes in conceptualization give rise to changes in both speech and gesture.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
