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In my talk I will present the results of a multimodal research which is being carried out by an international group of scholars at Moscow State Linguistic University (PI – A.Cienki).
First, I will show that, although a robust body of multimodal research in cognitive linguistics has been centered around various pragmatic and semantic parameters of co-speech gesture use, i.e. types of discourse, speakers’ intentions, metaphoric and metonymic mappings, significantly less attention has been paid to professional contexts that may relate to patterns of multimodal communicative behavior.
Building on the typology of gestures elaborated in (Müller 1998; Cienki 2013), we investigate gesture use in simultaneous interpretation (SI), and pose the following questions: What is the extent and the role of gesture use in SI, considering the fact that (a) interpreters find themselves under a certain amount of cognitive pressure, and (b) interpreters are normally trained to avoid producing gestures. Do gestural patterns relate to the direction of interpretation (from L2 to L1, or backwards) and to the expertise of interpreters? We assumed that although interpreters are taught to avoid producing gestures, extensive use of gestures with various functions is likely to be observed during speech disfluencies. The variation in gesture use will relate to the expertise of an interpreter and to the direction of SI, i.e., whether SI is from L2 to L1, or from L1 to L2.
In the second part of my talk I will present the empirical study that was carried out with 31 participants, native Russian speakers, divided into 2 groups - experienced and early simultaneous interpreters. I will outline the design of the research and show if the results we have obtained so far confirm the hypotheses or not. Finally, the methodological implications of the results will be discussed within a broader context of the semiotic nature of co-speech gestures used in SI.
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