Entre palavras e gestos manuais: uma abordagem multimodal da negação no português brasileiro

Abstract

Negation is a property common to all natural languages. Often understood as indicative of opposition, it encompasses syntactic-semantic and pragmatic processes. Through negation, speakers demonstrate commitment to something, perform subjective evaluations, or alter the propositional status of a sentence. Negation assumes assertive, modal, and propositional functions. Through it, speakers influence the actions of their listeners. In doing so, they perform speech acts that are not solely structured by grammatical items. Speech acts also involve manual gestures, highlighting the multimodal nature of language. Multimodal studies in English, French, and German (Kendon, 2004; Harrison, 2010; Bressem; Müller, 2014) argue that rejection, opposition, and negative evaluation are functions indicated by grammatical items and manual movements. From this perspective, negation operates in layers. In Brazilian Portuguese, studies on negation are traditionally conducted from two perspectives: variationist and/or informational. Não is the quintessential negation adverb. This lexical item can scope over nouns and verbs. When it scopes over verbs, it can appear in pre-verbal position (NEG1), in double position (NEG2), or in post-verbal position (NEG3). From a sociolinguistic perspective, the three possibilities of verbal negation constitute a variable phenomenon. In this framework, the use of one form or another is associated with grammatical and social factors. Conversely, from an informational perspective, the use of NEG1, NEG2, and NEG3 is constrained by the informational status of the negated content and provides clues about the communicative intentions between speaker and listener. Grammatical and informational factors are highly relevant to negation. However, by themselves, they are insufficient to explain the functions of this property. Interactions between speakers and listeners also involve the body, which "speaks" as well. In this thesis, we investigate whether manual gestures within the scope of the particle não constitute multimodal negation structures with distinct pragmatic functions. To this end, we analyzed negation data from 23 interviews in the Embodied Language 2023 sample. From these, we selected instances of NEG1, NEG2, and NEG3 performed simultaneously with manual gestures. Subsequently, we coded the grammatical, informational, and gestural aspects of the negation structures according to the methodology proposed in the Linguistic Annotation System (Bressem; Ladewig, 2011), enabling the analysis of their functions through association tests. We conclude that negation is a speech act that operates in three dimensions. Grammatical factors associated with its function include the semanticpragmatic feature of the verb within the scope of não, the type of verb, the type of subject, the post-verbal constituent of the negated verb, the discourse topic, and the textual type. From an informational perspective, the status of the negated content restricts the occurrence of NEG3, suggesting that there is no free alternation between NEG1, NEG2, and NEG3. Interactional factors influence their functions and uses, and manual gestures are associated with these factors. The sample we analyzed enabled the categorization of a wide range of gestures. Many of these gestures may reflect idiosyncratic patterns, making it challenging to establish generalizations. However, we observed that the distribution of assertive structures includes gestures that signal the speaker's commitment to what is being said. Such commitment is metaphorically presented through the "open hand" gesture, which is highly frequent in Italian (Kendon, 2004) and identified in Brazilian Portuguese by Santos (2021). Modal structures, on the other hand, are performed with gestures indicating distancing from undesirable elements or ideas. Similar movements are less frequent in propositional structures. These findings reinforce assumptions about the multimodal nature of language and the complexity of negation, which extends beyond grammatical structure.