Conventionalised metaphors and use of gestures across English and Maltese

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the use of metaphoric gestures produced by English and Maltese bilingual speakers. Ten speakers were selected to take part in an experiment, providing data where I explored whether the speakers express the same abstract notions and gestures, and whether these gestures are semi-conventionalised, due to individual creativity or affected by language, in this case English or Maltese. The analysis includes both a qualitative and a quantitative approach. The data used in this research are short films in which the participants describe a number of concepts presented to them in English or Maltese sentences, and provide gestures to illustrate the concepts. The gestures in the clips were annotated using a video annotation tool, Anvil (Kipp, 2004), and hence data features were extracted and analysed statistically using the statistical tool R (R Core Team, 2013) to find out if there were language-related differences in the way the concepts are expressed in the gestures. Only few such differences reach statistical significance, showing that language does not seem to affect the metaphorical gestures targeted here.