Multimodal existential constructions in German

Manual actions of giving as experiential substrate for grammatical and gestural patterns

Bibliographic Data

ID21226671
AuthorsIrene Mittelberg (0000-0002-6820-4515, RWTH Aachen University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume3
Issues1
Publication date2017-06-29
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics Vanguard (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2199-174X • E-ISSN: 2199-174X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/lingvan-2016-0047
OpenAlexW2602554511
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited57

Taking an Emergent Grammar (Hopper 1998) approach to multimodal usage events in face-to-face interaction, this paper suggests that basic scenes of experience tend to motivate entrenched patterns in both language and gesture (Fillmore 1977; Goldberg 1998; Langacker 1987). Manual actions and interactions with the material and social world, such as giving or holding, have been shown to serve as substrate for prototypical ditransitive and transitive constructions in language (Goldberg 1995). It is proposed here that they may also underpin multimodal instantiations of existential construsctions in German discourse, namely, instances of the es gibt ‘it gives’ (there is/are) construction (Newman 1998) that co-occur with schematic gestural enactments of giving or holding something. Analyses show that gestural existential markers tend to combine referential and pragmatic functions. They exhibit a muted degree of indexicality, pointing to the existence of absent or abstract discourse contents that are central to the speaker’s subjective expressivity. Furthermore, gestural existential markers show characteristics of grammaticalization processes in spoken and signed languages (Bybee 2013; Givón 1985; Haiman 1994; Hopper and Traugott 2003). A multimodal construction grammar needs to account for how linguistic constructions combine with gestural patterns into commonly used cross-modal clusters in different languages and contexts of use

Construction Grammar · Existentialism · German · Gesture · Grammar · Indexicality · Linguistics · Transitive relation · Computer Science · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology

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