Manual and facial gestures in the production of rhetorical: an acoustic-gestural description questions in a set of interviews in Brazil

Abstract

As some studies have pointed out, body and/or facial movements carry prosodic information, thus functioning as visual prosody. In this sense, we understand that these movements can provide important clues for the listener to infer meanings compatible with the speaker’s intentions. Based on this discussion, the aim of this paper is to describe the gestural and acoustic patterns of rhetorical questions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In order to investigate whether different question types have different acoustic and gestural characteristics, we performed a gestural description, using Elan 4.9.1 (LAUSBERG; SLOETJES, 2009), and an acoustic description, using Praat 5.2.01 (BOERSMA; WEENINK, 2010), of 69 rhetorical interrogatives obtained through the analysis of 6 interviews in Brazil. For gestural analysis, we draw on Ekman and Friesen’s (1976) face code system and Bressem’s (2013) gestural analysis system. For the discrimination of attitudes present in rhetorical interrogatives, we used as a basis the studies of Fónagy (1993), Antunes (2007), Moraes, Miranda and Rilliard (2012) and Moraes et al. (2010). Our results showed that there are no gestures and melodic curve characteristic of certain attitudes present in rhetorical questions, but nevertheless further endorsed the importance of these gestures in marking interrogatives.