ON THE SYNTACTIC REPRESENTATION OF CO-SPEECH GESTURES IN EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE

Language is assumed to be a multimodal system in which prosody, manual and non-manual gestures, and body positioning interact with syntactic structure in systematic ways. While gestures have often been analyzed from a semantic perspective, recent work has shown that they can be integrated into the syntactic architecture of the clause. We adopt this perspective and propose an analysis of co-speech gestures in expressive contexts, focusing on emotional meanings such as surprise and disapproval. Data from typologically diverse languages are considered. The discussion addresses three main questions: (i) What triggers the use of gesture in expressive utterances? (ii) Are these gestures language-specific or universal? (iii) What is their role within the grammar? We argue that a formal model integrating syntax, prosody, and gestures is required to account for the structural properties of expressive phenomena and to advance a theory of language as a fundamentally multimodal architecture.