Describing actions: the semantic role of gestures

Words and gestures are semiotic acts that build up our everyday social interactions. The semiotic resources of our body underpin language, and several papers from the field of gesture studies, psycholinguistics, and philosophy call for a language model incorporating all the visible actions engaged when speaking. In this study, we will use this broad approach to investigate action verbs in spoken Italian. In particular, we address the semantic role of representational gestures in describing actions, looking at the gesture-speech relationship. Fifteen Italian speakers watched and described forty-five videos, showing different actions grouped into five semantic domains. Results show that gestures tend to provide specific information on single action events. Still, it was possible to identify general action gestures (i.e. a gesture used to represent different action types in the same semantic domain). Moreover, representational gestures were frequently used to add information to the speech, specifically about manner and spatial aspects. Nevertheless, qualitative results point out the relevant role of equivalent gestures within the framework of linguistic redundancy. Conclusions emphasize the significance of gestures in the meaning-making process.