Spatial deixis in speech and gesture in Brazilian Portuguese: an experimental pilot-study

Autores

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17058/signo.v44i79.12829

Palavras-chave:

Spatial deixis, Experimental Cognitive Linguistics, Gesture Studies.

Resumo

Departing from the embodiment assumption that our conceptualizations are grounded in the physical world, gestures should also refer to those conceptualizations (BARSALOU, 1999; CIENKI, 1998A, 1998B, 2008, 2013; GLENBERG & ROBERTSON, 2000; HOSTETTER & ALIBALI, 2008). In this study, we investigate how our conceptualizations of the physical and of the abstract are expressed in speech and gesture, using the four-way spatial distinction found in Brazilian Portuguese between ‘aqui’ (near to speaker), ‘aí’ (near to addressee), ‘ali’ (near to both speaker and addressee), and ‘lá’ (distant to both). We tested two opposing hypotheses: 1) that gestures used with concrete and abstract deixis may be similar to each other, based on claims from embodiment theory, and 2) that gesture use may differ in concrete and abstract deixis, based on claims from neuroscience and based on patterns of usage of these deictic words found in a corpus of spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Twenty-four participants were asked to act out small scripts with eight contexts, each containing one occurrence of both concrete and abstract uses of ‘aqui’, ‘aí’, ‘ali’, and ‘lá’. The results show the semantic opposition between 'aqui' and 'lá' is also present in co-verbal gesture. But there was not a clear difference in gesture use with ‘aí’ as compared with the other key words, as one might have anticipated from the use of the word in the C-ORAL Brasil corpus. Gestures with concrete use of the key words are similar in some ways to gestures with abstract use, but there are also many differences. In conclusion, imagery seems to be activated with abstract reference using these spatial adverbial pronouns, but the factors motivating the particularities of the differences remain to be explored in future work.

Downloads

Não há dados estatísticos.

Referências

AZIZ-ZADEH, L. & DAMASIO, A. Embodied semantics for actions. Journal of Physiology-Paris. 2008, v.102. doi: 10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.012.

BARSALOU, L.W. Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1999, v. 22, p. 577-660.

BARSALOU, L.W., SIMMONS, W.K., Barbey, A., & Wilson, C.D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2003, v.7, p. 84-91.

BARSALOU, L.W. & WIEMER-HASTINGS, K. Situating abstract concepts. In: PECHER & ZWAAN, R. (eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 129-163

BERGEN, B.K., LINDSAY, S., MATLOCK, T., & NARAYANAN. Spatial and linguistic aspects of visual imagery in sentence comprehension. Cognitive Science, 2007, v. 31, p. 733-764.

BERGEN, B. K. Louder than words: the new science of how the mind makes meaning. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

BOULENGER, V., HAUK, O., & PULVERMULLER, F. Grasping ideas with the motor system: semantic somatotopy in idiom comprehension. Cerebral Cortex, 2009, v. 19, n. 8, p. 1905-1914.

BOWER, G. AND MORROW, D. Mental models in narrative comprehension. Science, 1990, v, 247, p. 44-48.

CIENKI, A. Metaphoric gestures and some of heir relations to verbal metaphoric expressions. In Jean-Pierre Koenig (ed.), Discourse and cognition: Bridging the gap. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1998a, p. 189-204

CIENKI, A. STRAIGHT: An image schema and its metaphorical extensions. Cognitive Linguistics, 1998b, v. 9, p. 107-149.

CIENKI, A. Why study metaphor and gesture? In: Alan Cienki and Cornelia Muller (eds.), Metaphor and gesture Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, p. 5-25.

CIENKI, A. Cognitive Linguistics: Spoken language and gesture as expressions of conceptualization. In: Muller, Cienki, Fricke, Ladewig, McNeill, TeBendorf (eds.) 2013, Body – Language – Communication (HSK 38.1), De Gruyter Mouton, 2013, p. 182-201.

GLENBERG, A.M. and Kaschak, M.P. Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2002, v. 9, p. 558-565.

GLENBERG, A.M. AND ROBERSTON, D.A. Symbol grounding and meaning: A comparison of high-dimensional and embodied theories of meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 2000, v. 43, p. 379-401.

HOSTETTER, A.B. & ALIBALI, M.W. Gesture as simulated action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2008, v. 15, n.3, p. 495-514.

JOHANSSON, R., HOLSANOVA, J., HOLMQVIST, K. What do eye movements reveal about mental imagery? Evidence from visual and verbal elicitations. In Proceedings of the 27th Cognitive Science Conference, Stresa, Italy, 2005.

JOHNSON, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

KENDON. A. Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

LAKOFF, G. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

LAKOFF, G. & JOHNSON, M. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

MATLOCK, T. Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory and Cognition, 2004, v.32, n. 8, p. 1389-1400.

MCNEILL, D. Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

MCNEILL, D., CASSELL, J., & LEVY, E.T. Abstract deixis. Semiotica, 1993, v.95 n.1-2, p. 5-20.

MCNEILL, D. (2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

RASO, T. & MELLO, H. C-ORAL Brasil. 2012. Available at: http://www.c-oral-brasil.org/

Date of access: June, 2016

RICHARDSON, D.C., SPIVEY, M.J., MCRAE, K., & BARSALOU, L.W. Spatial representations activated during real-time comprehension of verbs. Cognitive Science, 2003, v. 27, p. 767-780.

SAYGIN, A.P. & Stadler, W. The role of appearance and motion in action prediction. Psychological Research, 2012, v.75, n.1.

SLOBIN, D. Thinking for speaking. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1987, p. 435-445.

SLOBIN, D. From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking.” In: GUMPEREZ, J., LEVINSON, S. (eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 70-96.

SPIVEY, M., & GENG, J. (). Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: Eye movements to absent objects. Psychological Research, 2001. v.65, p.235-241.

SWEETSER, E. Looking at space to study mental spaces: Co-speech gesture as a crucial data source in cognitive linguistics. In: GONZALEZ-MARQUEZ,M, MITTELBERG, I, COULSON, S, SPIVEY, M. (Eds.), Methods in cognitive linguistics, 201-224. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.

WALLENTIN, M., OSTERGAARD, S., LUND, T.E., Ostergaard, L., & Roepstorff, A. Concrete spatial language: See what I mean? Brain and Language, 2005, v. 92, n. 3, p. 221-233.

WILSON, N. L., & GIBBS, JR., R. W. Real and imagined body movement primes metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science, 2007, v.31, p.721-731.

Downloads

Publicado

2019-01-03

Como Citar

Cienki, A., Avelar, M., Donlon, S., Vilela, C., & Pacheco, V. (2019). Spatial deixis in speech and gesture in Brazilian Portuguese: an experimental pilot-study. Signo, 44(79), 135-143. https://doi.org/10.17058/signo.v44i79.12829

Edição

Seção

Metáforas Multimodais