We are using the TV News Archive—an online, open-access repository of over 1.8 million news programmes—to investigate the gestures that speakers perform when using particular linguistic expressions. Due to its size, the TV News Archive enables the large-scale, quantitative analyses to uncover trends in speakers’ gestures, which in turn can shed light on cognition and the relationship between language and gesture. Our research has implications for research areas such as metaphor, iconicity and multimodal construction grammar.
Researchers:
Bodo Winter
Marcus Perlman
Jeannette Littlemore