Thinking,Speaking And Gesturing:Grammatical Aspect In Spoken Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Multimodal Communication

As one of the most important linguistic categories for representing events in Chinese and English,grammatical aspect reflects and influences speakers' cognition of events.This thesis addresses the multimodality of grammatical aspect in event representation to investigate the interrelations between grammar,gesture and cognition.The main questions we explore are:1)what differences there are in the gestural expressions of the basic grammatical aspectual contrast(perfective vs.imperfective aspect)in natural Chinese conversations;2)how gestures correlate with different meanings of the Chinese imperfective aspect and English progressive aspect;and 3)whether there is evidence that L1 Chinese L2 English FL learners change their thinking for speaking and gesturing patterns to construe events when taking an internal viewpoint(i.e.,,progressive aspect)in the L2.Adopting qualitative and quantitative corpus-analytical methodologies,we systematically examined native Chinese speakers',native English speakers' and high-intermediate L1 Chinese L2 English FL learners'multimodal representations of aspectual distinctions while thinking for speaking and gesturing about events.The results showed that the gestures accompanying Chinese grammatical aspect at the macro-and micro-levels were not different in terms of handedness,but in the iteration of movement and functions.At the macro-level,the gestures with the imperfective aspect were more likely to be iterated and to be iconic in form than those with the perfective aspect.At the micro-level,the gestures with the progressive aspect zdi were more likely to be iterative than those with the actual aspect le,the experiential aspect guo and the durative aspect zhe(Chapter 3).In addition,the imperfective utterances were more likely to be accompanied by iconic gestures representing combinations of event elements than the perfective utterances in concrete events were.The frequencies of gestures with both the perfective and the imperfective utterances were equally high and mainly iconic for action in metaphoric events.The gestures with the imperfective aspect were more likely to be iconic representing schematic processes than were those with the perfective aspect for inherently abstract events(Chapter 4).We found in Chapter 5 that almost all of the gestures co-occurring with the progressive construction were dynamic,enacting out the physical actions or the schematic process.However,a little more than half of the gestures with the durative construction were dynamic in the linguistic contexts,such as V zhe NP(verbs with high dynamicity),V zhe V zhe(V is reduplicated),and na zhe V(hold/carry zhe V).The other half of the gestures were static,enacting out the maintenance of one portion of the actual actions or demonstrating the resultant states.For the English progressive aspect,its "continuous ongoingness" interpretations were found to have greater potentials to be multimodal.However,only when the progressive construction encoding "continuous ongoingness"were the co-speech gestures more likely to be iconic,representing actions involved in the events(Chapter 6).We also found that the FL learners negatively transferred their L1 thinking for speaking about events to the L2 construal of events with the wrong use of tense,absence of copula,etc.They positively transferred the frequency of iconic gestures from L1 Chinese to L2 English(Chapter 7).The results suggest that the cross-linguistic differences did indeed influence their speakers' thinking for speaking and gesturing patterns,whereas the cross-linguistic similarities cannot guarantee the similar thinking for speaking and gesturing patterns.The FL learners maintained part of L1 thinking for speaking and gesturing patterns,absorbed some salient L2 thinking for speaking and gesturing patterns,and also developed mixed thinking for gesturing patterns in their interlanguage.This thesis furthers our understanding of the relation between grammar,gesture and(event)cognition and suggests that grammatical aspect has the potential to be multimodal and embodied,and it plays a critical role in speakers' speaking and gesturing about events.