Meaning in multisemiotic messages – functions of gestures accompanying speech as elements of utterance structure

Abstract

The topic of the article will be the discussion of the issue of how gestures accompanying speech may complement a gap in a statement. The considerations will cover particular ways of filling such a gap, both semantically and taking into account the place of the gesture in the syntactic structure of the sentence. The subject of interest will be the analysis of spontaneous statements of interlocutors, which will allow for the isolation of word-gesture wholes; it will likewise describe the relationship between the two modes ahead of recounting the functions of gestures in the structure of the entire utterance. The analysis is based on commentaries from one of the journalistic programs hosting politicians in Poland.

Keywords

• gestures accompanying speech, multisemiotic, embodiment of meaning, metaphoric gestures