A Cognitive-semiotic Approach To Multimodal Figures Of Thought In Thai FL Class Co-speech Gesture

It is well known to linguists that nowadays metaphor and metonymy are among the most popular topics in cognitive linguistics. The concepts of metaphor and metonymy have no longer limited to figures of speech, but are considered as "figures of thought". They are unique ways of thinking for human beings. A great number of researches have proved that as ways of thinking, metaphor and metonymy are everywhere in daily use of language. What the author is intended to do in this thesis is to extend metaphorical and metonymic research from cognitive-linguistic field to cognitive-semiotic field and from pure language research to co-speech gesture research. What's more, the research will be conducted in cross-cultural multimodal communicative situations to see how the interlocutors encode and decode co-speech gestures in order to find the evidence of "metaphorical and metonymic ways of thinking". What has been stated above is also the major question to be solved.To make sure that the thesis is built upon a sound research foundation, quite a number of theoretical concepts are involved, including metaphor and metonymy in terms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semiotics, multimodality, and co-speech gesture. They are intertwined with each other to form the theoretical framework that supports later analysis. To make sure that the research is objective, methodology adopted mainly comprises two aspects:data collection and processing. All the materials in form of video are taken from lessons given by English and Chinese foreign teachers in a secondary school in Thailand, which are around six hours in total. These materials are going to be processed by a software named ELAN 4.9.2 whose major function is to annotate audio and video documents.There are several findings after multimodal analysis of co-speech gesture:(1) in multimodal communication where utterances and co-speech gestures are included, metaphorical gestures always appear when the object or concept expressed is isomorphic to the body part involved; meanwhile, metonymic gestures will appear instead when the object or concept expressed is hardly isomorphic to the body part involved; (2) in cross-cultural multimodal communicative situation, besides the spoken words, we should at the same time be aware of proper use of co-speech gesture, which is also crucial for us to communicate successfully; (3) metaphorical and metonymic thinking patterns not only exist in spoken language, but also appear in co-speech gesture; (4) when metaphor draws most of the attention from researchers, metonymy should not be ignored, for sometimes, the latter is more fundamental than the former.