Análise cognitiva de dados verbais e verbo-gestuais em usos da dêixis locativa no português e no inglês

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, the fields of Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and Gesture Studies have been converging with mutual and growing interest (Cienki, 2016). In this new field of research, one of the topics that stands out most within the theoretical framework of CL is Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Therefore, in this study, we propose to describe the prototypical and metaphorical uses of the locative deictics “aí,” “ali,” and “lá” in Brazilian Portuguese and their counterpart in American English, “there,” based on verbal and multimodal data. We correlate gesture and speech in order to investigate gestural patterns associated with each type of use of the deictics. We also draw on current studies on multimodality, with an emphasis on gesture and conceptualization (Kendon, 2004; Cienki, 2013; Pinheiro and Avelar, 2017) and gesture and metaphor (Cienki, 1998; Cienki and Müller, 2008; Avelar, Ferrari, and Pacheco, 2022). Verbal data were extracted from the D&G corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English; audiovisual data were collected from Red Hen Lab and videos available on YouTube. The results showed prototypical and metaphorical uses in both languages. The analysis of verbo-gestural data indicated a prevalence of pointing gestures in more concrete uses, with differentiation in the dimension of gesture space in PB deictics and greater balance in English. In metaphorical uses, in addition to pointing gestures, the analysis demonstrated the occurrence of different gestural modes of representation (Müller, 1998a, 1998b, 2014), with a predominance of the “drawing” mode.