A Multimodal Study On Anaphoric Repair In Interview Discourse

As the crossing domain of reference and conversational repair,anaphoric repair has aroused a wide variety of interests,most of which have been put in the verbal mode of repair.Besides the verbal mode,this study aims to explore the gestural mode and the interaction between these two modes in terms of anaphoric repair in an interview discourse.In our corpus,which is built with 25 episodes of the interview program Behind the Headlines with Wen Tao in Phoenix Satellite Television,anaphoric repairs can be divided as regards their repair referents into four types:repair to concrete person,repair to concrete object,repair to concrete place and repair to abstract entity.With respect to their verbal mode,these repairs can be classified into four types:using nominal expression to repair nominal expression,using nominal expression to repair pronominal expression,using nominal expression to repair zero form and using pronominal expression to repair pronominal expression.In terms of their forms and functions,gestures annotated in the data can be categorized into four types:deictic gesture(big pointing and small pointing),iconic gesture(modeling,enactment and depiction),metaphoric gesture and beating gesture.The interaction between the verbal and gestural modes in the data can be divided into the interaction of form and that of role,the former manifesting concurrence of the two modes while the latter indicates their respective importance in anaphoric repairs.Based on the above scheme,this thesis annotates the data in the corpus and does statistic analysis of different types of anaphoric repair with the help of ELAN,and the study concludes with the following preliminary findings:In anaphoric repair to concrete person,using nominal expression to repair another nominal expression is the most frequent lexical-grammatical form.Deictic gesture is the dominant gestures employed by interlocutors.Its main functions include highlighting the referent,introducing new information and making clarification.In anaphoric repair to concrete object,the major form employed by interlocutors is also using nominal expression to repair nominal one.Meanwhile,metaphoric gesture is the most frequently employed gesture to highlight information and offer vivid depiction of the referent.In anaphoric repair to concrete place,people mainly use nominal expression to repair nominal expression.Although there are few instances of this kind of repair,various gestures are adopted to be co-occurred with the verbal mode.Among these gestures,deictic gesture is the one mostly employed mainly to highlight information and make clarification.In anaphoric repair to abstract entity,repairing nominal expression with nominal expression is still the most frequently form.Metaphoric gesture is the dominant gesture,which is possibly due to the abstract meaning and image of the referent.It is used to highlight information or to help make detailed description of the referents.Generally speaking,using nominal expression to repair nominal one occupies the dominant position in terms of verbal mode.As for gestural mode,more deictic gestures are employed in the repairs to person and place,while the repairs to object and abstract entity are realized with more metaphoric gestures and iconic gestures.Different from abstract entity,concrete object has definite appearance for description,which leads to higher frequency of iconic gestures in the repair to object whereas the repair to abstract entity is realized with more metaphoric gestures.There are four kinds of form interaction between the verbal mode and the gestural mode on the trouble source and repair item of a repair sequence:one referential expression interacts with one gesture;one referential expression interacts with multiple gestures;multiple referential expressions interact with one gesture;multiple referential expressions interact with multiple gestures.The role interaction between the verbal mode and gestural mode can be divided into two types:the gestural mode being subordinate to verbal mode,or the two modes being in an equal status.Taking into consideration the interaction occurring in the four types of anaphoric repair,using one referential expression to interact with one gesture is the most frequent type of form interaction,which is due to the heavy use of bare nouns in nominal expression and one-off deictic gestures when making repairs.As for the role interaction of the two modes,verbal mode always takes a dominant position,while gestures can be complementary or redundant in meaning construction in anaphoric repairs to different types of referents.Compared with those in the repair to concrete entities,the gestures employed in repair to abstract entities offer more information and play a complementary role when interacting with repairing language.