Pragmatic gestures and prosody

Résumé En

The study presented here focuses on two pragmatic gestures: the hand flip (Ferré, 2011), a gesture of the Palm Up Open Hand/PUOH family (Müller, 2004) and the closed hand which can be considered as the opposite kind of movement to the opening of the hands present in the PUOH gesture. Whereas one of the functions of the hand flip has been described as presenting a new point in speech (Cienki, 2021), the closed hand gesture has not yet been described in the literature to the best of our knowledge. It can however be conceived of as having the opposite function of announcing the end of a point in discourse. The object of the present study is therefore to determine, with the study of prosodic features, if the two gestures are found in the same type of speech units and what their respective scope is. Drawing from a corpus of three TED Talks in French the prosodic characteristics of the speech that accompanies the two gestures will be examined. The hypothesis developed in the present paper is that their scope should be reflected in the prosody of accompanying speech, especially pitch key, tone, and relative pitch range. The prediction is that hand flips and closing hand gestures are expected to be located at the periphery of Intonation Phrases (IPs), Inter-Pausal Units (IPUs) or more conversational Turn Constructional Units (TCUs), and are likely to be co-occurrent with pauses in speech. But because of the natural slope of intonation in speech, the speech that accompany early gestures in Intonation Phrases should reveal different features from the speech at the end of intonational units. Tones should be different as well, considering the prosodic structure of spoken French.