Towards a speech-gesture profile of discourse markers: The case of ‘I mean’

• We illustrate a multimodal corpus pragmatic approach to studying discourse markers. • We establish a speech-gesture functional profile of ‘I mean’. • ‘I mean’ mainly functions to mark speech ‘editing’ and ‘introducing modifications’. • Gestures co-occurring with ‘I mean’ mainly perform the function of presenting. • Speech and gesture functions of ‘I mean’ are in multimodal and pragmatic alignment. Our study aims to develop a new corpus pragmatic approach for exploring the gesture patterns (i.e. functions and forms) co-occurring with the discourse marker ‘I mean’, including a comparison with previous research on another discourse marker (i.e. ‘you know’). We selected and analysed 246 instances of ‘I mean’ and 88 gestures that co-occur with these instances from the supervisory sub-corpus of the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus (654 mins, 118,508 words). A functional framework for the analysis of speech functions was developed based on the emerging speech patterns surrounding ‘I mean’. This included three functions: ‘editing’, ‘introducing modifications’ and ‘ending modifications’. The co-occurring gestures were categorised into four functional types: pragmatic, referential, beat and deictic gestures. The main results of the speech analysis of ‘I mean’ suggest that ‘I mean’ tends to be used predominantly as a marker of ‘editing’ (163 instances, 66.26%) and ‘introducing modifications’ (80 instances, 32.52%), both of which emphasise the speaker’s intention to present additional information. These findings largely resemble those of ‘you know’; however, the functions of ‘you know’ are more varied. The analysis of the gesture patterns co-occurring with ‘I mean’ shows that both the ‘editing’ and ‘introducing modifications’ functions tend to co-occur with pragmatic gestures that serve a similar function of presenting and offering information (e.g., open hand palm up and open hand palm oblique gestures), mirroring the results of ‘you know’. These results suggest a functional coordination between discourse markers and gestures.