Intensity and its manifestations in speech and recurrent gestures in spontaneous dialogue

The present article explores the category of intensity in multimodal spontaneous dialogues in Russian.We regard intensity as a cognitive category expressed in notional, referential and sign meanings, i.e. in its manifestation degrees (high, medium, and low) and interaction of quantitative and qualitative meanings, referent types and types of lexical meaning.We study multimodal intensity patterns as revealed in the spontaneous dialogue in question, with the main focus on recurrent co-speech gestures, where the latter are attributed the stability of form and function.The research material consists of the recordings of about 3 hours featuring 20 participants, 1082 speech intensifiers, and 392 corecurrent gestures of 9 groups.The results show, despite the susceptibility to individual preferences, that this is the notional meaning of intensity in speech that is more consistently revealed in recurrent gestures.The presenting recurrent gesture group appears to be most numerically frequent, nevertheless, these are enhancing and locating gestures that could help distinguish between pure quantity and merged quantity-quality cases.In general, exploring the use of gestures as mediated by intensity meanings allowed to specify their discourse functions attributed to intensity.