This talk presents results from a study analyzing gestures co-occurring with the discourse marker “entonces” (then) in a corpus of 24 narrations from native and non-native speakers of Spanish. “Entonces” often indicates a temporal sequential nexus. However, it has a number of other pragmatic functions including cognitive, inferential and metadiscursive.
This talk will present results from a study analyzing gestures co-occurring with the discourse marker "entonces" (then) in a corpus of twenty four narrations from native and non-native speakers of Spanish. "Entonces" often indicates a temporal sequential nexus linking two propositions. However, it has a number of other highly pragmatic functions including cognitive, inferential and metadiscursive, such as to manage the turns and indicate a shift of theme or speech difficulties (also observed by Bestgen, 1998), or to provide logical-argumentative relations between propositions. The classification of the pragmatic meaning of the gestures follows the framework developed by Borreguero Zuloaga and López Serena (2011) to categorise discourse marker functions.
In both, native and non-native speakers, we observed that over half of gestures co-occurring with "entonces" are of a recurrent nature, with some forms being repeated, such as cyclical gestures and arc gestures, seemingly "bridging" the transition between two events (also noted by Cooperrider and Núñez (2009)). Referential gestures tend to refer to the second proposition, confirming the prosodic observations by Dorta Luis and Domínguez García (2003) and beats and lexical gestures are more often observed in language learners when the discursive marker is used to stress part of the proposition or hold the floor.
