1. Valeriia Denisova, Alan Cienki, Olga Iriskhanova (MSLU & VU Amsterdam)
BOUNDARY EXPRESSION IN VERBS AND GESTURE: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN L1 AND L2 SPEAKERS
Valeriia Denisova, Alan Cienki, Olga Iriskhanova (MSLU & VU Amsterdam)

2. Basic concepts
The research is focused on multimodal cues to the mental representation of aspectual opposition: perfectivity and imperfectivity in L1 (RU & FR) and L2 (RU-FR)
The notion of boundaries is considered as the central parameter of aspectual distinction
Bounded events – perfective forms
Unbounded events – imperfective forms

3. Basic concepts
Perfective forms: совершенный вид (Ru); Passé composé (Fr)
Imperfective forms: несовершенный вид (Ru); Imparfait (Fr)
Bounded gestures have at least one clear pulse of effort
Unbounded gestures have no clear pulse of effort

4. Bounded gesture

5. Unbounded gesture

6. Research question
We hypothesized that co-verb gestures will follow the boundary schemas of the aspectual forms of the verbs:
Perfective forms - bounded gestures
Imperfective forms - unbounded gestures

7. Materials and methods
Video-recorded oral narratives of personal experiences were collected
20 participants in Russian L1 videos
20 participants in French L1 videos
20 participants in French L2 videos (Russians speaking advanced French)
Videos were annotated in ELAN for tense, aspect and gesture boundedness

8. Results for Russian L1 and French L1
Imperfective X2 = 17.89, df = 1, p <0.01
Perfective X2 = 27.31, df = 1, p < 0.01
Imperfective X2 = 17.89, df = 1, p < 0.01
Perfective X2 = 27.31, df = 1, p < 0.01

9. Results for French L2 Imperfective X2 = 2,415, df = 1; p = 0.12

10. Conclusion
For Imperfective, the FR-L2 gestures show a pattern in between RU- L1 and FR-L1 (not surprising);
For Perfective, the FR-L2 gestures show a surprising change; other factors of gesture use play a role (e.g., word-search gestures, repetitions)

11. Noise factors (related to L1 and L2 data)
Verbal factors
- analytical forms in French (j’ai toujours pensé);
- infinitive constructions in Russian (начали крутиться);
-specific aspectual meanings in Russian (я ездила туда много раз).
Gesture-related factors
- influence of various gesture functions.
L2 data-related factors
- repetitions;
- search-for-word gestures.

12. References
Becker R., Cienki A, Bennett A, Cudina C., Debras C., Fleischer Z., Haaheim M., Müller T, Stec K., Zarcone A. (2011), Aktionsarten, speech and gesture; Proceedings of GESPIN 2011: Gesture and speech in interaction, pp. 30–35.
Bondarko A. V. (1971), Tense and aspect of Russian verb [Vid i vremja russkogo glagola], Prosveščenije, Leningrad.
Calbris G. (2011), Elements of meaning in gesture, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
Cienki A.,Iriskhanova O. (Eds.) Aspectuality across languages: Event construal in speech and gesture, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam (in press).
Comrie B. (1976), Aspect, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Duncan S. (2002), Gesture, verb, aspect, and the nature of iconic imagery in natural discourse, Gesture Vol. 2 (2), pp.183–206.
Garey H. B. (1957), Verbal Aspect in French Language, Language, Vol. 33 (2), pp. 91– 110.
Gullberg M. (1998), Gesture as a Communication Strategy in Second Language Discourse. A Study of Learners of French and Swedish, Lund, Lund.

13. References
Laban R., Lawrence F. C. (1974), Effort: Economy of Human Movement, Macdonald and Evans, London.
Ladewig S. H. (2011), Putting the cyclic gesture on a cognitive basis, CogniTextes, Vol. 6, available at:
Langacker R. W. (2008), Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Maslov U.S. (2004), Selected works. Aspectology. General Linguistics [Izbrannije trudy. Aspectologija. Obščeje jazykoznanije]. Jazyki slavjanskoj kultury, Moscow.
McNeill D. (1992), Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Padučeva E. V. (2010), Semantic studies. The semantics of tense and aspect in Russian. The Semantics of a narrative [Semantičeskije issledovanija. Semantika vida i vremeni v russkom jazyke. Semantika narrativa], Jazyki Slavjanskoy Kultury, Moscow.
Parrill F., Bergen B. K., Lichtenstein P. V. (2013), Grammatical aspect, gesture, and conceptualization: Using co‐speech gesture to reveal event representations, Cognitive Linguistics, Vol. 24 (1), pp. 135–158.

14. Acknowledgements
PoliMod Lab of the Centre for Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies (
Russian Science Foundation grant #