Summary of the thesis

This thesis is an attempt to explore linguistic and gestural representations of viewpoints in the descriptions of third-person past events within Chinese conversational discourse. Following McNeill’s contention that “one area of meaning where speech and gesture are coexpressive is the point of view” (1992:118), this study also investigates whether the speech-accompanying gesture often collaborates with language in expressing the same or different viewpoints within the descriptions of an event in the joint expression of viewpoints.

Three types of viewpoints are identified in the framework of this study. Speaker viewpoint (S-VPT) is expressed when speakers in talking about past events are also concerned about the maintenance of the ongoing conversation, by interacting with co-conversationalists or by making a comment or showing their attitude to reveal their current status as a speaker. In conveying observer viewpoint (O-VPT), speakers describe the past events like an observer not involved in the event, refraining themselves from either re-enacting the roles of the characters or attempting to maintain the ongoing conversation. Character viewpoint (C-VPT) is represented as a

speaker’s attempt to walk into the temporal and spatial frame of the past events by reconstructing the scene of the past events from the perspective of the different characters in the scene and enacting their thoughts, speech and other deeds.

By focusing the analysis on conversational data, this study shows that various linguistic structures and paralinguistic devices, together with other embodied nonverbal resources that accompany the gesture can serve to represent the three viewpoints. With respect to the representations of linguistic viewpoints, speakers make use of the interrogative sentence, phrasal expressions such as speculative, suggestive, evaluative and emotive expressions, parenthetical remarks, and lexical items such as the impersonal use of second-person pronoun to convey speaker viewpoint. In addition, speakers can also use paralinguistic devices such as discourse markers and laughter to state their role as a current speaker within an ongoing conversation. For observer viewpoint, indirect reported speech and plain statements are linguistic representations that suggest speakers are talking about the past events like an outside-the-event observer. In representing character viewpoint through language, speakers make use of different modes of direct quote, including direct speech, voiced direct reported speech, and inner speech to enact characters’ speech and thoughts in the past events.

With regard to the gestural representations of viewpoints, a gesture is synthetic in

that several features composed of a single gesture interact with each other to represent a certain viewpoint. Five gestural features—gestural space, handedness, stroke duration, frequency of the stroke, and the involvement of other body parts are identified as crucial and indicative criteria in representing the three viewpoints.

Quantitative study of linguistic and gestural viewpoints shows that speech-accompanying gesture in the descriptions of third-person past events within conversational contexts displays different patterns from that of those found in language in the distribution of speaker viewpoint, observer viewpoint, and character viewpoint. The distribution of the three viewpoints in language suggests that observer viewpoint is the most common choice for speakers to use to talk about a past event in an ongoing conversation, while character viewpoint is the least frequently chosen.

Character viewpoint, in contrast, is the most frequently adopted viewpoint in the gestural channel. While observer viewpoint is also commonly expressed, speaker viewpoint is rarely seen in gesture despite the fact that speakers in talking about third-person past events are occasionally also concerned about the ongoing conversations and therefore represent the speaker viewpoint in language. The discrepancy in the distribution of viewpoints in language and gesture, respectively also imply the possibility of the existence of mismatching viewpoints in the joint expression of viewpoints in language and gesture concerning a description of the

same event. Quantitative study of the collaborative expressions used in both modalities further manifests this fact by showing that 64.7% of all gestures produced in the current data represent a viewpoint different from that conveyed in language in the description of the same event. Therefore, this study shows that while language and gesture are co-expressive in terms of viewpoints, gesture more often collaborates with the accompanying speech in representing different viewpoints from that conveyed in language.

The collaborative expressions of viewpoints in language and gesture suggest how speech and gesture coordinate with each other in organizing information concerning third-person past events and are able to express different viewpoints also lead us to see the cognitive process that underlies both linguistic and gestural modalities within daily human communication. Two hypotheses of speech and gesture production—the Lexical Semantics Hypothesis and the Interface Hypothesis are referred to in order to provide theoretical accounts for the findings in this study.

The Lexical Semantics Hypothesis claims that gestures are generated from the semantics of lexical items in the accompanying speech. The current data provide evidence against the Lexical Semantics Hypothesis by showing that 33.9% of all gestures produced have gesture content that corresponds to the semantics of a phrase in the accompanying speech, suggesting that gesture content is not necessarily