A Multimodal View of Aspectuality in Oral Narratives

The book considers the ways in which people construe events as bounded and unbounded in oral communication, using aspectual forms and co-speech gestures. The results reveal differences in event construal in multimodal terms by speakers of Russian and French, marking the ways in which boundedness is realized in spontaneous oral narratives.

The book focuses on event boundedness which can be expressed in the aspectual distinction (perfective and imperfective) and on kinesthetic level between gestures that include one or several energy impulses (bounded) and smooth gestures (unbounded). The correlation of verbal and gestural expression of event boundedness is studied on the basis of oral narratives produced by Russian L1, French L1 and (Russians as) French L2 speakers. The results reveal differences in event construal in multimodal terms by speakers of different languages. Overall, the book gives insight into not only the category of aspect, but also the ways in which it is realized in spontaneous oral narratives, and more generally: event construal on the verbal and gestural levels.

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