What counts as a relevant gesture in the study of multimodal event expressions?

Margetts, Anna and Jorgensen, Eleanor and Burke, Isabelle and Sheppard, Harriet (2025) What counts as a relevant gesture in the study of multimodal event expressions? Gesture, 23 (3). pp. 217-258. ISSN 1568-1475

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Abstract

This article explores how methodological decisions about which gestures to include impact the analysis of multimodal event representation. Gestures commonly temporally align with semantically co-expressive speech. However, when we consider not single concepts but whole events the picture gets more complicated, since events are not mapped onto single lexical items but across larger stretches of spoken language. To research gesture-speech integration in multimodal event expressions we must decide which gestures are considered ‘relevant’. Using caused motion events as a case study, we apply different definitions of gesture inclusion relating to temporal and semantic alignment. We investigate the impact of definition choice on the results by exploring corpus data from Australian English and two endangered Oceanic languages, Saliba-Logea and Sudest. The study shows comparable trends across some conditions but also language- and definition-specific differences. This has a bearing on how confidently we can compare studies based on different methodologies and/or languages.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	gesture studies, event representation, methodology, speech-gesture alignment, caused motion, linguistics, Oceanic languages, Papua New Guinea, English
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
Divisions:	School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education (SPACE)
Depositing User:	Harriet Sheppard
Date Deposited:	12 Mar 2026 23:42
Last Modified:	12 Mar 2026 23:42
URI:	https://repository.usp.ac.fj/id/eprint/15294

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