Mimetics, gaze, and facial expression in a multimodal corpus of Japanese

要旨

Mimetic/ideophonic utterances are often accompanied by expressive prosody and iconic gesture. This chapter reports the speaker’s facial expression and eye contact with the hearer as two more possible nonverbal correlates of mimetics on the basis of a multimodal corpus of Japanese interviews. It is shown that, unlike prosody and gesture, these somewhat frequent facial behaviors are not correlated with the morphosyntactic features of mimetics because of their primarily affective and interactional nature. However, a weak correlation with morphosyntax is suggested for the speaker’s gaze redirected away from the hearer, which is considered a signal of ‘depictive’ signification prototypical mimetics illustrate.

主題