Action-Depicting Gestures and Morphosyntax: The Function of Gesture-Speech Alignment in the Conversational Turn

The current study examines the role of action-depicting gestures in conversational turns by focusing on their semantic characteristics and temporal position in relation to their verbal affiliates (action verbs or more complex verb phrases). The data are video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in multilingual construction sites in Norway. The analysis distinguishes two modes of action depiction: generic depictions, which represent the action as a general type, and contextualized depictions, which in addition include deictic references to the spatio-material environment or iconic representations of the specific manner of action performance. These two modes typically occupy differ…