A cognitive analysis of the locative deictic “lá” in co-occurrence with hand gestures in the Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

It is understood that Cognitive Linguistics, linked to the field of Gesture Studies, is a relatively new area of study in Brazil. Within a multimodal approach, deictic expressions are often associated with Pointing Gestures (Kendon, 2004), since these actions establish a referential interrelation between the discourse, or utterance, and the space-time conditions in which it occurs (Avelar; Ferrari, 2017). Pointing gestures may indicate the physical and immediate space shared by speakers, a concrete object present in the interaction environment, as well as the speaker's structuring/schematization of ideas (Mc Neill; Cassel; Levy, 1993). The main goal of this paper is to analyze, from a cognitive-gestural perspective, the behavior of hand gestures when they cooccur with the locative deictic “lá” in different communicative situations in Brazilian Portuguese. Our specific goals are: (i) to map the cognitive and conceptual elements that are involved in the relation of locative deictic with hand gestures; (ii) to describe the functioning of occurrences of the locative deictic “lá” in co-occurrence with hand gestures in different data samples from different communicative situations in Brazilian Portuguese. From a methodological point of view, we anchored ourselves on the Metaphor Identification Guidelines for Gesture (MIG- G), proposed by Cienki (2016) and also on the Linguistic Annotation System for Gesture (LASG), previously proposed by Bressem, Ladewig and Müller (2013). In order to isolate and categorize gestural forms and functions, we built a track of analysis in the professional software ELAN (Sloetdjes; Wittenburg, 2008), which consists of a detailed annotation tool that provides us with a more accurate analysis of videotaped and audiovisual data. The analyzed data were collected from YouTube, clips from the show Que História É essa Porchat? and Flow Podcast channel, in an interview with Simone Tebet, candidate for the presidency of the republic in 2022. The results point out that the verb-gestural uses observed in the occurrences of “lá” along with hand gestures embody a sense of distance, not always such a clear, or punctual distance. The gestures indicate points of space in relation to the location of the participants in the acts of communication. Thus, we understand that “lá” is used when a speaker wants to determine a distance of something in relation to his or her own body, without necessarily delimiting or precisely locating the distance or specific point of a referent or target.