Precision in gestures and words

Abstract

This paper investigates the notion of precision in cognition and communication, it overviews the gestures conveying precision analysed in the literature on multimodality and provides an analysis of the precision gesture of the beak in a corpus of oral university examinations. Based on a corpus of transcribed Italian real speech,a linguistic analysis is also proposed of the beak’s lexical affiliates (the adverbs esclusivamente, proprio, appunto) and of their possible meanings.

Keywords

• multimodal communication
• precision gesture
• vagueness