Multimodal marks of iteration in discourse

Abstract This article investigates the way speakers combine different verbal and gestural resources to express aspectual meaning in American English, specifically the way an event is repeated. It identifies stable gestural correlates to the OVER AND OVER adverbial phrase, which involves lexical iteration. Speakers have been shown to rely on co-verbal gestures to communicate aspectual information along with lexical and grammatical means. However, most of the research has focused on hand gestures, and on comparing the embodiment of different categories of aspect. Cyclic gestures have particularly been found in aspectual contexts, and linked with meanings of motion, either physical or metaphorical, as well as continuity. We use video datasets of spoken American English belonging to the Distributed Little Red Hen Lab (Steen et al. 2018) as part of the UCLA Library NewsScape Archive. We determine which formal features participate in the expression of iteration, in a variety of articulators (hands, head, eyebrows), and carry out a quantitative analysis, targeting gesture proportion, timing, and duration. This study shows how gestural components blend in and participate in the expression of grammatical and pragmatic meaning in speech. More specifically, it adds to the ongoing discussion within Construction Grammar about conventionality in multimodal constructions.