Simon Harrison

• Professor (Assistant) at University of Nottingham Ningbo China

This paper describes the rationale for and design of a new multimodal corpus of L2 academic English from a Sino-British university in China: the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (cawse). The unique context for this corpus provides language samples from Chinese students who use English as a second language (L2) in a preliminary-...

This chapter reports on the motivations, design, and challenges of building the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (CAWSE), an open-access corpus of Chinese students’ English samples collected from a Sino-British university in China. To date, the corpus comprises over 1.5 million words in the subcorpus of written assessment, a su...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/impulse-to-gesture/6EA0742F118A2F3DD544DEE4AEDBF3C6#fndtn-information Gestures are central to the way people use language when they interact. This book places our impulse to gesture at the very heart of linguistic structure: grammar. Based on the phenomenon of negation – a linguistic universal with clear gramma...

Language Related Episodes occur when speakers explicitly question lexical and grammatical aspects of the language they are using, resulting in collaborative discourse and assisted performance from peers. This paper demonstrates how such negotiation and repair may occur in relation to the gestural component of a speaker's expression, leading us to i...

Lifeguards stationed opposite their swimzone on a beach in southwest France huddle around a diagram in the sand; the Head Lifeguard points to the sun then looks at the swimzone. What is going on here? Our paper examines two excerpts from this interaction to explore how lifeguards manage an instruction activity that arises in addition to the task of...

This paper explores collaborative discourse between a group of students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds as they discuss in English at a British university in China. Critical moments in our data occurred when the local Chinese students responded to requests from an international American student for information about Chinese geogr...

In this paper, we present novel observations indicating that the syntax of clause negation in French constrains how speakers perform a specific gestural form associated with negation. As previously demonstrated for English (Harrison 2010), the Palm-Down-Horizontal-Across (PDA) gesture that we study tends to be coordinated with the main propositiona...

Locations and movements in gesture space reflect both interactional and conceptual constraints. This paper presents evidence that suggests gesture space is at least partially structured by a conceptual axis projecting outwards from the speaker’s body, along which gestures are positioned or moved to reflect the construal of negation as distance – he...

This paper investigates metaphor use in a heavily industrialized context. Using video recordings collected at a salmon factory in France as data, I study metaphor in the gestures that workers perform in technical specialist communication along a noisy production line. Within a framework for describing gesture forms and identifying their underlying...

This paper describes the organisation of kinesic ensembles associated with negation in speech through a qualitative study of negative utterances identified in face-to-face conversations between English speakers. All the utterances contain a verbal negative particle ( no , not , nothing , etc.) and the kinesic ensembles comprise Open Hand Prone gest...

On a beach in France, a lifeguard makes three attempts to teach a colleague how to use a wristwatch and the sun to find compass directions. Each attempt involves constructing and coordinating representations in multiple spaces: sand, surroundings, watch, and air (gesture space). Close examination reveals how the hands, eyes, and body construct and...

This paper examines the temporal coordination of a subset of gestures in relation to speech containing negation. Based on qualitative observations of 'palm down' gestures in naturalistic data, I show that the gestures tend to occur either with or after the verbal negative particle, but not before. Analysing 10 utterances, I identify the different s...

In this paper, I examine the role of visible bodily action in a French Sign Language (FSL) classroom. With data from an authentic produc- tion exercise, I analyse how a novice signer com- municates with her body to simultaneously produ- ce utterances in FSL for a camera while maintaining a pedagogical interaction with her instructor. With frame-by-...

Negative structures are a characteristic of all human languages. One such structure is 'node' and 'scope' of negation. In an utterance, the node is the location of a negative form, and the scope is the stretch of language to which the negation applies. In this paper, I examine a gesture that English speakers perform when they negate and show how sp...

Gesture space is described as a "shallow disk" (McNeill 1992) or "quarter-sphere" (Sweetser & Sizemore 2006) in front of the speaker's body where communicative hand movements that accompany speech are produced. Goodwin (2007) points out that many gestures are "environmentally coupled," gaining meaning from their relations to objects on and over whi...