(In)Transitivity in multimodal construal of events

The book represents a research, which investigates how speakers of Russian use gestures with transitive and intransitive constructions while construing different types of events. The purpose of the study was to establish whether there is a correlation between the type of structure, event structure and gesture. The practical part of the study consists in the analysis of video materials (15.3 hours) taken from Russian TV programme " ". The total corpus of examples amounts to 200 transitive and intransitive constructions, accompanied by gestures. There was discovered a number of facts that influence the use of gestures with transitive/intransitive constructions: discursive factors, internal and argumentative structure of events and elements that are in the focus of gesture. The research provides deep insight into the nature of multimodal communication and cognition and establishes a connection between them.

Autorentext

Ekaterina S. Varenik, MBA: Studied linguistics, Intercultural Communication and Pedagogic at Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow. Teacher of English at MSLU. Member of the the Multimodal Communication and Cognition Laboratory PoliMod . Research interests: cognitive semantics, discourse studies, multimodal communication, gestures in speech.