Islands of iconicity: a usage-based approach to capturing meaning-making processes in gesture

This study presents an example of an integrative, usage-based approach to capturing different levels of representation in co-speech gestures. We propose an annotation procedure that is demonstrated here using an extract from a multimodal corpus of Czech conversations. The 10-min extract captures 3 speakers interacting during a business meeting. The core idea behind our approach is that different aspects of the form-meaning mapping should be treated as dimensions that may interact with each other – these dimensions may include the degree of perceived iconicity based on rating, the type of form-meaning association, or the character of the form-meaning mapping (focusing on cognitive processes of which the gesture may be seen as a manifestation). Such an approach aligns with a current shift in cognitively oriented gesture studies (and beyond) away from categorical and discrete views of multimodal representation, toward more gradual and dynamic accounts.