French Face-to-Face Interaction: Repetition as a Multimodal Resource - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 147

2.5 Gesture annotations
Ninety minutes of the CID involving six speakers were coded for
gestures. We manually annotated hand gestures, head and eyebrow
movements as well as gaze direction with Anvil (Kipp, 2001).
Different typologies have been adopted for the classification of
hand gestures, based on the work by Kendon (1980) and McNeill (1992,
2005). The formal model we use for the annotation of hand gestures
is adapted from the specification files created by Kipp (2004) and
from the MUMIN coding scheme (Allwood et al., 2005). Both models
consider McNeill's research on gestures (1992, 2005).
The changes made to existing specification files only concerned
the organization of the different information types and the addition
of a few values for a description adapted to the CID. For instance,
we added a separate track 'Symmetry'. In case of a single-handed
gesture, we coded it in its 'Hand_Type': left or right hand. In case
of a two-handed gesture, we coded it in the left Hand_Type if both
hands moved in a symmetric way or in both Hand_Types if the two
hands moved in an asymmetric way. For each hand, the scheme and
annotation file in Anvil has 10 tracks.
2.5.1 Functional categories
The gesture types we annotated are mostly taken from McNeill's
work. Iconics present “images of concrete entities and/or actions”,
whereas Metaphorics present “images of the abstract”, they “involve a
metaphoric use of form” and/or “of space” (McNeill, 2005:39). Deictics
are pointing gestures and Beats bear no “discernible meaning” and are
rather connected with speech rhythm (McNeill, 1992:80). Emblems are
conventionalized signs and Butterworths are gestures made in lexical
retrieval. Adaptors are non-verbal gestures that do not participate
directly in the meaning of speech since they are used for comfort.
Although they are not linked to speech content, we decided to annotate
these auto-contact gestures since they give relevant information on
the organization of speech turns. For gesture phrases, we allowed
the possibility of a gesture pertaining to several semiotic types using
a boolean notation.
2.5.2 Descriptive annotations
A gesture phrase (i.e. the whole gesture) can be decomposed into
several gesture phases, i.e. the different parts of a gesture such as
preparation, stroke (the climax of the gesture), hold and retraction
(when both hands return to rest) (McNeill, 1992). The scheme presented