Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Construction Grammar
- Part I The Constructional View of Language
- Part II Methodological and Empirical Foundations of Constructional Research
- Part III Case Studies in Constructional Morphosyntax
- Part IV Multimodality and Construction Grammar
- 13 Prosodic Constructions
- 14 Insubordination at the Interaction of Discourse, Grammar, and Prosody
- 15 Construction Grammar and Gesture
- 16 Constructional Approaches to Signed Language
- Part V Constructions in Sociocultural and Typological Variation
- Part VI Constructional Applications
- Index of Terms
- Index of Languages
- Index of Constructions
- References
15 - Construction Grammar and Gesture
from Part IV - Multimodality and Construction Grammar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2025
- The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Construction Grammar
- Part I The Constructional View of Language
- Part II Methodological and Empirical Foundations of Constructional Research
- Part III Case Studies in Constructional Morphosyntax
- Part IV Multimodality and Construction Grammar
- 13 Prosodic Constructions
- 14 Insubordination at the Interaction of Discourse, Grammar, and Prosody
- 15 Construction Grammar and Gesture
- 16 Constructional Approaches to Signed Language
- Part V Constructions in Sociocultural and Typological Variation
- Part VI Constructional Applications
- Index of Terms
- Index of Languages
- Index of Constructions
- References
Summary
This chapter presents the current state of research in multimodal Construction Grammar with a focus on co-speech gestures. We trace the origins of the idea that constructions may have to be (re-)conceptualized as multimodal form–meaning pairs, deriving from the inherently multimodal nature of language use and the usage-based model, which attributes to language use a primordial role in language acquisition. The issue of whether constructions are actually multimodal is contested. We present two current positions in the field. The first one argues that a construction should only count as multimodal if gestures are mandatory parts of that construction. Other, more meaning-centered, approaches rely less on obligatoriness and frequency of gestural (co-)occurrences and either depart from a recurrent gesture to explore the verbal constructions it combines with or focus on a given meaning, for example, negation, and explore its multimodal conceptualization in discourse. The chapter concludes with a plea for more case studies and for the need to develop large-scale annotated corpora and apply statistical methods beyond measuring mere frequency of co-occurrence.
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar , pp. 384 - 404Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025