Debreslioska Sandra, Gullberg Marianne
Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Lund University Humanities Lab, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Front Psychol. 2020 Sep 23;11:1935. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01935. eCollection 2020.
The literature on bimodal discourse reference has shown that gestures are sensitive to referents' information status in discourse. Gestures occur more often with new referents/first mentions than with given referents/subsequent mentions. However, because not all new entities at first mention occur with gestures, the current study examines whether gestures are sensitive to a difference in information status between brand-new and inferable entities and variation in nominal definiteness. Unexpectedly, the results show that gestures are more frequent with inferable referents (hearer new but discourse old) than with brand-new referents (hearer new and discourse new). The findings reveal new aspects of the relationship between gestures and speech in discourse, specifically suggesting a complementary (disambiguating) function for gestures in the context of first mentioned discourse entities. The results thus highlight the multi-functionality of gestures in relation to speech.
关于双峰话语指称的文献表明，手势对话语中指称对象的信息状态很敏感。与已知指称对象/后续提及相比，手势在新指称对象/首次提及中出现得更频繁。然而，由于并非所有首次提及的新实体都会伴随着手势出现，因此本研究考察了手势是否对话语中全新实体和可推断实体之间的信息状态差异以及名词确定性的变化敏感。出乎意料的是，结果表明，与全新指称对象（听者新且话语新）相比，手势在可推断指称对象（听者新但话语旧）中出现得更频繁。这些发现揭示了话语中手势与言语关系的新方面，具体表明了手势在首次提及的话语实体背景下具有补充（消除歧义）功能。因此，这些结果突出了手势相对于言语的多功能性。
