The theories and methods in corpus linguistics (CL) have had an impact on numerous areas in applied linguistics. However, the interface between CL and multimodal speech-gesture studies remains underexplored. One fundamental question is whether it is possible, and even appropriate, to apply the theories and paradigms established based on textual data to multimodal data. To explore this, we examine how CL can assist investigating lexico-grammatical patterns of speech co-occurring with a recurrent gesture (i.e. the circular gesture). Sinclair’s (1996) unit of meaning model is used to describe the co-gestural speech patterns. The study draws on a subset of the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus, in which 570 instances of circular gestures and their co-occurring speech are identified and analysed. We argue that Sinclair’s unit of meaning model can be extended to include speech-gesture patterns, and that those descriptions enable a more nuanced understanding of meaning in context.

中文翻译：

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基于语料库的语音手势意义单位描述

语料库语言学（CL）的理论和方法对应用语言学的许多领域产生了影响。然而，CL 和多模式语音手势研究之间的接口仍未得到充分探索。一个基本问题是，将基于文本数据建立的理论和范式应用于多模态数据是否可能，甚至是否合适。为了探索这一点，我们研究了 CL 如何帮助调查与重复手势（即圆形手势）同时出现的语音的词汇语法模式。Sinclair (1996) 的意义模型单元用于描述协同手势语音模式。该研究利用了诺丁汉多模式语料库的一个子集，其中识别并分析了 570 个圆形手势实例及其同时出现的语音。