Speech, hand, and facial gestures

a proposal of a multimodal approach to describe negative structures with não in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In an interactional encounter, verbal structure, hand, and face gestures form usage events in which lexical items, together with these body movements, assume specific functions. In Brazilian Portuguese, negation can be expressed by não in pre-verbal, double, and post-verbal positions. Analysis based only on verbal structures assumes that these negative structures are three ways to express opposition. However, pragmatic studies assume that they express different conversational functions: denegation, thematic pause, return to a quantitative topic, face-saving, and negative evaluation. Multimodal approaches to gestures in German, English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese suggest that negation has a gestural component. Based on that, we propose a multimodal analysis of negative structures with não in Brazilian Portuguese, assuming that negative structures with this particle suggest different functions, also characterized by hand and facial gestures.