Motion event components and gesticulation as linguistic practice in Turkish

The present study investigates motion event expressions and their accompanying gestures in Turkish. Gestures, the non-verbal signals, are assumed to represent cognitive organizations along with speech. It aims to present the lexicalization patterns of motion event descriptions in Turkish to find out at what rate Turkish speakers prefer using a gesture to complement speech when describing motion event and how they combine the speech and gestures in V(erb)-framed Turkish language. Furthermore, it tries to explain the relationship between linguistic typology and gestures, depending on Talmy’s (1985) grouping of languages. In order to achieve this aim, the typological features of Turkish are examined in relation to another part of human speech gestures. In order to reach the above-mentioned aims of the study, Turkish speakers’ narrations are analysed. The participants are asked to narrate a story by looking at the drawings of a picture book. Gestures are marked by EXMARaLDA and their types are specified. As a result, it can be claimed that Turkish speakers’ speech and gesture do not follow the typology of their language strictly. One of the important results of this study is that path of the motion is more frequently gestured than the manner of the motion. Furthermore, it has been observed that reoccurring motion verbs are not gestured since the time span between the occurrences of those verbs play an important role in gesturing