Topicalisation and gestures

Abstract

In this thesis, fronting is defined as the placement of one or more verbal complements at the beginning of sentences, where the speaker does this for information-packaging purposes. Hence, topicalisation is a construction of a sentence whereby constituents are not placed in their canonical order. Thus, the rest of the sentence then serves as means of extra information and describes the events undergone by the topicalised constituents. The fronted phrase can function as the topic or the focus of the sentence, often with a contrastive dimension, depending on the context. Topicalised sentences usually have a discontinuity characteristic created by the use of intonation and stress, which then separates the topicalised phrase from the rest of the sentence. Topicalisation can also be used as a constituency test. These principles can also be applied to Maltese but Maltese is a non-configurational language, in other words, it has a relatively free word order. Therefore, this research serves as a study to determine some of the characteristics of topicalisation in Maltese. Maltese speakers tend to single out the topicalised phrase by the use of intonation. Studies claim that different tunes are used in general to express the topic. On the other hand, there has not been a lot of research on non-verbal behaviour such as hand gestures. Therefore, the aim of this study is to determine if Maltese speakers emphasize topicalised phrase by using also non-verbal behaviour. The analysis was done through the use of video clips and tried to identify topicalised sentences and the accompanying hand gestures with their relative characteristics. The video clips formed part of the MAMCO Project and the topicalised sentences are extracted from the MAMCO corpus. The gestures were annotated using the ANVIL Tool and qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to analyse the data. Examples were analysed to determine their constituents as well as their relevant clitics. Lastly, five topicalised sentences were compared to five non-topicalised control sentences which contained a gesture to check whether the hypothesis that hand gestures have a different function in connection with topicalisation holds. From the analysis of the data it was found that in the large majority of the examples examined, for each topicalised constituent the speakers made an accompanying hand gesture either to reinforce some properties of the referenced concept with their hands or as a beat to put extra emphasis on the topicalised word.