Hand gestures with verbs of throwing: Collostructions, style and metaphor

Abstract

Abstract This paper is an exploratory corpus-based study of a set of verbs of throwing and their co-occurrence with iconic gestures. It is hypothesized that the (in)formality and the metaphoricity of verbs is related to co-speech gesture frequency, but ultimately, relatively little evidence is found for such relationships. A simpler alternative assumption, i.e. that it is mental simulations that drive co-speech gesture alone, has to be dismissed, too, because the frequency of co-speech gesture is markedly different across verbs, ranging from roughly 41 to about 60 per cent (lob vs. fling, respectively). One possible explanation might be that, just as with co-occurrences between purely verbal signs, some verbs are conventionally associated with certain types of gestures to a higher degree. With sufficient data, we can quantify these associations, making use of statistics developed for research on collocation and collostruction.