Article

Name: Pragmatic Aspects of the Functioning of Emotive Units and Their Accompanying Gestures in the TV Show Discourse

Authors: Irina V. Zykova, Federica Ruggeri

Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation; Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The paper highlights the most important moments in the history of gestural linguistics. One of its key issues concerns the peculiarities of the interaction of verbal and kinetic means that are involved in rendering human emotions and feelings in the processes of interpersonal communication. During the analysis of modern concepts in the field of language theory, linguistics of emotions and linguistic pragmatics, three types of emotive units are identified for further research: direct and figurative names of emotions and feelings and emotive speech acts. The connection of these types of emotive units with pragmatic gestures has been established. Based on the criteria developed in the research, two interviews were selected from the Italian TV show “Che tempo che fa” with the running time of about 35 minutes. The applied complex methodology, including the stages of markup and deep annotation of the material, let us establish the most relevant formal and semantic parameters of the interaction of emotive units and manual gestures used by the talk show participants. The formal parameters include “(a)synchronization of the emotive unit and gesture” and “boundaries of the gesture accompanying an emotive unit”. The semantic parameters are “hand-edness”, “direction of gesture movement”, “domain of gesture acting” and “palm configuration”. The research results also involve: the established specifics of the distribution of three types of emotive units in the analyzed TV interviews; the stated quantitative indicators of the ratio of emotive units accompanied and not accompanied by hand gestures; the discovered patterns of correspondence between gestures and certain types of emotive units and the character of the semantic (coreferent) connection of a manual gesture with one or another type of an emotive unit.

Keywords: gestural linguistics, emotive units, hand gesture, TV show, TV interview, the Italian linguoculture

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