Towards a corpus-based description of speech-gesture units of meaning

The theories and methods in corpus linguistics (CL) have had an impact on numerous areas in applied linguistics. However, the interface between CL and multimodal speech-gesture studies remains underexplored. One fundamental question is whether it is possible, and even appropriate, to apply the theories and paradigms established based on textual data to multimodal data. To explore this, we examine how CL can assist investigating lexico-grammatical patterns of speech co-occurring with a recurrent gesture (i.e. the circular gesture). Sinclair’s (1996) unit of meaning model is used to describe the co-gestural speech patterns. The study draws on a subset of the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus, in which 570 instances of circular gestures and their co-occurring speech are identified and analysed. We argue that Sinclair’s unit of meaning model can be extended to include speech-gesture patterns, and that those descriptions enable a more nuanced understanding of meaning in context.