Multimodal Reference by Means of the Pronoun We and Hand Gestures in a Novel Corpus of Parliamentary Opening Debates

Abstract

Political discourse has persuasion as its main goal and the identification of the referents of pronouns in it is of great importance. This paper presents a novel multimodal corpus of Danish parliamentary opening debates. It also describes a study of multimodal reference by means of the first-person plural pronoun "vi" (we) and the co-occurring hand gestures in a subset of the corpus. The data in the study consists of 219 speeches of two prime ministers from the opening debates in 2013, 2014, and 2021-2024. In the speeches, the prime ministers answer questions of parliament members from the opposition. The uses of the first-person plural pronoun in political speeches are particularly interesting since the pronouns can refer to different groups, such as the government, the parliament, the country, or a specific party and can be used by politicians to achieve consensus or distinguish their politics from that of others. The main hypothesis we want to investigate in the study is whether the pointing gestures vary in their trajectory depending on the intended referents. The results of our study confirm this hypothesis for the most frequent referent types and show how pointing hand gestures are used by the two prime ministers to help their audience individuating the correct referents of "vi", and emphasise them. Our data also indicates that co-speech hand gestures are in some cases used to show the attitude of the speakers toward what they are saying.

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