Dr Daniel Alcaraz Carrion from the University of Murcia, Spain, will be the speaker on 16 October 2020.
In this talk, I will introduce some of the work that the Deadalus lab (University of Murcia, Spain) has performed in collaboration with the Distributed Little Red Hen Lab on the speech-gesture relation in time expressions. All the data employed for this research has been extracted from the NewsScape television archive, a multimodal television repository of television news.
The first part of this presentation will focus on big data approaches to English time gestures thanks to the quantitative power offered by the NewsScape Library. I will start talking about gesture frequency patterns in temporal language. Then I will move to describe the relation between formal gesture features such as axis, gesture direction or gesture distance, and different types of temporal language. Finally, I will introduce some of our latest research on Spanish time gestures, with a focus on the concept of temporal duration, speech-gesture synchronisation as well as speech-gesture congruency.
The second part of the presentation will be devoted to more creative realisations of time gestures. These types of gestures may deviate from the patterns that were previously reported, and present more complex realisations that may include other multimodal components such as facial gestures, gaze and the interaction with the communicative context.
The picture that emerges is that time conceptualisation patterns in communication are much more complex than previously thought. Time gestures are quickly adapted to each communicative situation and are the result of the interplay of the mental patterns and the circumstances of the communicative exchange.
