Article 79 (184) Revisiting the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis: Speech and gesture representation of motion in Danish and Italian

Revisiting the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis: Speech and gesture representation of motion in Danish and Italian

Many studies try to explain thought processes based on verbal data alone and often take the linguistic variation between languages as evidence for cross-linguistic thought processes during speaking. We argue that looking at co-speech gestures might broaden the scope and shed new light on different thinking-for-speaking patterns. Data comes from a corpus study investigating the relationship between speech and gesture in two typologically different languages: Danish, a satellite-framed language and Italian, a verb-framed language. Results show cross-linguistic variation in how motion components are mapped onto linguistic constituents, but also show how Italian speakers to some degree deviate from standard verb-framed lexicalization patterns, and use typical satellite-framed constructions.