Grammar and the Body: A Multimodal Study of the Grammaticization of Hebrew 'ani lo mevin/a ‘I don’t understand’

Abstract

Based on audio- and video-recordings of over 19 hours of casual conversation, this study explores the ways Hebrew speakers deploy linguistic and embodied means when producing the mental verb construction 'ani lo mevin/a ‘I don’t understand (M/F)’. We study the emergence of this construction and its grammaticization path, shedding light on a correlation between the types of gesture accompanying its production and its discourse functions. We found that deployment of the construction is fixed and formulaic and seldom refers to lack of understanding. More often, it expresses puzzled stance or conveys criticism. Furthermore, we found correlation between prosodic, morphophonological, syntactic, and embodied features of the construction and its discourse functions: if the construction was accompanied by a gesture in our corpus, the literal function was accompanied by a substantive gesture referring to the extralingual world; the puzzled stance was accompanied by a pragmatic-modal gesture expressing the speaker’s stance towards the utterance; and the function conveying criticism was accompanied by a pragmatic-modal gesture instructing the interlocutor on how to interpret the upcoming utterance. Correlation between the types of gesture accompanying production of a construction and its discourse functions has not yet been described in the literature. Our study thus contributes a significant expansion in the field of grammaticization studies.