Preliminary Prosodic and Gestural Characteristics of Instructing Acts in Polish Task-Oriented Dialogues

摘要

In the present study, selected properties of multimodal instructing acts are discussed. Realisations of the instructing acts extracted from a corpus of task-oriented dialogues are analysed in terms of their syntactic structure, prosodic properties and accompanying gestures. The syntactic structures found in the material are similar to those found in earlier studies on map task dialogues. Deictic vocabulary is more frequent in gesture-supported instructions. The mean relative pitch range is similar to the values obtained for instructions in earlier studies and different from the values for syntactically similar questions. As opposite to verbally ill-formed instructions, the well-formed ones tend to contain at least one gestural stroke. It is shown that the relative range of pitch frequency is higher in the gesture-accompanied instructing acts. It is also noticed that prosody and gesture may play similar roles in utterances.