The Accompanying Gestures for Discursive Markers of Surprise

A gesture is a sign that gives a visual signal to the viewer. It has such properties as awareness, intention, informativeness, controllability, unselfishness (Kendon, 2004). But I concentrate only on co-speech gesticulation (McNeill, 1992). These gestures occur mainly in the accompaniment of speech. Discourse formulas play an important role in speech because they are "the tools by which the general meaning of a person's reaction is conveyed" (Fillmore, 1984). Discourse formulas are a reaction to a situation or some previous remark of the interlocutor, which is a speech act that requires a reaction. Unlike conventional constructions, there are no variables in their composition, which usually form the basis for traditional interpretation (Apresyan, 1974). To solve this problem, you can use the suprasegmental characteristics of these language units. Indeed, these constructions are usually accompanied by special gestures and special intonation corresponding to the emotion of surprise. Our goal is to determine the classification of discourse markers of surprise with respect to these accompanying characteristics and show the correlation of each class with its specific gesture and intonation contour. In this study, we used the national corpus of the Russian language (NRC) to analyze the use of discourse formulas of surprise. Based on the search results, we investigated which speech acts react and with what value the structures of interest to us are used. Our task is to study the accompanying gestures, that is why we need video material on which the gestures of the speakers are clearly visible. Unfortunately, the Multimodal Corpus (MURCO) has not enough material for our research, we conduct an experiment, which help us to collect information about gestures. We analyze 45 discourse formulas of surprise and get four classes of these constructions: TRUST, VALUE, ASKED AGAIN and GUESS. These are the basic groups of our markers. Each group is marked with the specific complex of gestures: 1) TRUST is marked by «move head front», «frown eyebrows», «spread hands»; 2) VALUE is marked by «move chin sideways», «frown eyebrows», «spread hands»; 3) ASKED AGAIN is marked by «swing head», «transfer look into communication area»; 4) GUESS is not marked by specific gestures (we didn’t get statistically significant result, p-value was > 0.05) We find out that two mimic gestures – «raise eyebrows» and «frown eyebrows» - depends on value of DM: • «Raise eyebrows» is relevant for positive value • «Frown eyebrows» is relevant for negative value We did not find correlation between groups of DM and intonation. Intonation counter depends on form of discourse marker (question or definite sentence), number of syllables and so on.