Micronarrative: unit of analysis for quantitative studies of gesture in focus interviews

• Anna Jelec ^[1] ; Malgorzata Fabiszak
  1. [1] University in Poznań, Poland
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 229, 2019
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Language is an inherently multimodal phenomenon, which constructs meaning through various modes: verbal, vocal and gestural. For certain types of gesture, the frequency matters just as much as the form. In the studies investigating gesture frequency, the traditional unit of analysis is gesture per word (de Ruiter et al., 2012), gesture per minute (Chu and Kita, 2016), or both (Hostetter et al., 2007). However, none of these measures alone work well with non-experimental data, such as recordings of focus interviews gathered in the course of our study of the collective memory of the inhabitants of Poznań. In this article, we propose a new unit of analysis, the micronarrative, that permits the quantitative analysis of the frequency of gestures in stories constructed by multiple interlocutors. We provide a definition, and demonstrate the procedure for identifying it in non-experimental settings, such as focus group interviews.