Embodiment of Concrete and Abstract Concepts
Authors:   , Tong Yao 
Published: February 2023

The present thesis focuses on speakers’ gesture and aims to investigate the relationship between gesture and concrete and abstract concepts—within the embodied view of meaning.

Chapter 2 clarifies the motivation and main research question of the current thesis, that is, to what extent the grounding of abstract concepts is similar to or different from that of concrete concepts. Chapter 3 illustrates how examining gestural patterns (i.e., gesture occurrence and gesture form) can provide valuable insights into the similarities and differences between the grounding of concrete and abstract concepts.

Specifically, Chapter 3 reviews one particular theory—the Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework, which is consistent with the EVoM, and which provides several predictions about gestural patterns in the process of thinking and speaking. Particularly relevant to the current thesis, three predictions about gestural patterns in relation to the similarities and differences between concrete/abstract concepts are summarized in Chapter 3. These predictions lay the foundations for the three empirical chapters (Chapter 5-7) in the current thesis. Furthermore, the final section of Chapter 3 argues for using a video corpus of relatively spontaneous talk in interaction to add a more ecological approach to examining real-world gesture use.

Chapter 4 illustrates the establishment of the video corpus that was used for the empirical work in this thesis. It describes how the corpus was compiled and also contains details about the transcription of the data and initial annotations of speech and gesture. Based on 46 interviews from an American TV talk show—The Ellen DeGeneres Show—the corpus with 44,240 words provides a basis for the empirical studies conducted in Chapters 5-7.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the first and second predictions about gesture occurrence, and Chapter 7 is related to the third prediction, concerning gesture form. In addition to their focus on gesture occurrence and form, Chapters 5-7 specify concrete/abstract concepts from different perspectives: Chapter 5 from the perspective of concreteness ratings of words, Chapter 6 from the perspective of concrete and abstract semantic fields, and Chapter 7 from the perspective of literal and metaphorical meaning.

Specifically, Chapter 5 focuses on the relationship between gesture occurrence, concreteness, and parts of speech. By examining how gesture occurrence differs across concreteness ratings and across parts of speech, this chapter aims to investigate whether gesture occurrence for concrete concepts (indicated by higher concreteness ratings of words) is similar to or different from that for abstract concepts (indicated by lower concreteness ratings of words). Results of the analysis show that gestures are more likely to co-occur with concrete concepts than with abstract concepts, especially for concepts that are expressed in the form of nouns and verbs.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between gesture occurrence and various semantic fields. This chapter zooms in on the fine-grained varieties of concrete and abstract concepts (indicated by words in specific semantic categories) that might have been overlooked in Chapter 5. The main finding shows that gestures are more likely to co-occur with concrete semantic fields than with abstract semantic fields.

To complement Chapters 5 and 6 which examine gesture occurrence, Chapter 7 focuses on the form of gesture. This chapter also provides an additional perspective to investigating concrete and abstract concepts when they are indicated by the literal and metaphorical use of words. Specifically, Chapter 7 investigates how certain gesture forms interact with metaphoricity and verb types in the expression of motion. Results of the analysis reveal that gesture forms vary when describing literal vs. metaphorical motion, although the variation is mediated by the use of motion verb types.