Semantics of Pre-Speech Gestures in Spoken Russian

The work is dedicated to pre-speech gestures, gestures whose apex ends before its associated word. Its aim was to investigate the cases of such gestures and generalize why some information put forward by the speaker. For this purpose, the Corpus on Russian Multichannel Discourse, that consists of three video-sessions with media files and annotations, was chosen. I focused on differences between co-speech and pre-speech gestures in several aspects: (i) their function in the discourse; (ii) their role in an utterance; (iii) type of words they associated with; (iv) aspects of the associated word they depict; (v) semantic contribution of associated words and their own; (vi) their duration and (vii) syntactic level they accompanied. The statistical analysis shows that significant differences between pre-speech and co-speech gestures lie only in their role and syntactic level they accompanied. I found no significant differences in semantic aspects. What makes to conclude that the nature of pre-speech gestures is cognitive rather than semantic.