MULTIMODAL SPATIAL DEIXIS IN SPEECH AND GESTURES: FRAMES OF REFERENCE IN EXPLANATORY DISCOURSE

Abstract

The study explores the distribution of deictic words and gestures in multimodal explanatory discourse. To proceed, we compile the corpus of speech and gesture in which the experiment participants are explaining the difference between close synonyms. The study develops the method of modelling deixis as a discourse frame of reference which allows to identify objects and situations via pointing at them. We show that two frames of reference - egocentric and allocentric - help explore the discourse semantics of deictic words and gestures on the same grounds using the coordinates of two frames which are the distance from the speaker (closer to the speaker / farther from the speaker) and the type of communicative situation in discourse (the internal communicative situation / the external communicative situation). The results reveal that the differences between the two frames of reference may not always be explicit in the semantics of deictic words, still they may appear in the use of gesture types.