Co-speech Gesticulation Accompanying Verbs of Motion in Russian

The main purpose of this study is a more detailed and specific description of gestural patterns associated with motion verbs in Russian and the determination of the degree of influence of the semantics of spatial prepositions and adverbs on accompanying gesticulation. In the monograph of E. Grishina (Grishina 2017) it is shown that prefixes and verbal roots in Russian correlate with certain trajectories of movement of the hand and head relative to the speaker. However, the work does not cover spatial prepositions and adverbs accompanying constructions with this group of verbs. In order to validate and complement the results of E. Grishina on the accompanying gesticulation of Russian verbs of motion, we conduct a corpus-based study using three sources: Russian Multimedia Corpus (database of films, lectures, and performances), Russian Multi-Channel Discourse Corpus (communicative episodes) and NewsScape (television report database). We look at two groups of verbs of motion (as in the study of E. Grishina) with semantic components of root “trajectory” (begat' ‘to run’), “downward movement” (padat' ‘to fall’). For this study, we perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the frequent constructions for these verb groups. The main conclusion the work is as follows: the character of accompanying gesticulation for verbs of motion in the Russian language is determined by the context. The character of the gesture is influenced by the semantics of the verb root, the semantics of the verb prefix, the presence of spatial adverbs, and the presence of the verb arguments. The findings of our study complement the existing paradigm of the gestural patterns for verbs of motion in the Russian language.