手勢之補足性質與認知處理(III)

Abstract

This paper investigates what kinds of information can be conveyed by complementary gestures that do not have a direct syntactic and semantic relation with particular linguistic constituents, what discourse functions the gestures have in communication, and how the relationship between gesturing and speaking can help in understanding the organization of information in Chinese daily conversation. The findings show that complementary gestures can convey attitudinal, scriptevoked, and topical information. With regard to what all the participants are talking about, these various types of information are not the immediate concern of the participants at the moment of utterance; nonetheless, the complementary gestures provide additional meanings to enrich speech events or maintain the continuity of a topic under discussion.