French Face-to-Face Interaction: Repetition as a Multimodal Resource - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 155

have to be identical, either at a phonetic level (duration, fundamental
frequency) or at a phonological level (phrasing, pitch contours, or
rhythm pattern). Following Szczepek Reed (2006), we use the term
prosodic matching to refer to the repetition of a prosodic pattern.

5. Analysis

First, it must be noted that other-repetition is not quite frequent in
our corpus when considering gesture. Although we have seen in
the introduction and Section 3 that conversations constitute joint
activities in which meaning is co-constructed by participants, this
co-construction does not necessarily entail gesture repetition. Gesture
repetition is therefore probably dependent on many other factors like
topics, collaborative tasks, but also the conversational history of the
participants. Indeed, Tabensky (2001) mentions that gesture repetition
occurs pretty much at the beginning of the conversations she works
on, in which participants are not acquainted with each other. In our
corpus, participants know each other quite well and therefore have
a long conversational history which could explain why less gestural
adjustment is needed between them. Tabensky (op. cit.: 232-233)
also states that “textual repetition of words and retakes with small
adjustments are generally not accompanied by gesture”, which is also
what we find since there is a much vaster quantity of verbal repetition
and hardly any at all involve gesture repetition. However, we will see
in this section that when gesture repetition is present, it can be quite
complex especially when related to verbal and prosodic repetition in
a multimodal perspective.

5.1 Repetition as a confirmation request

In example 1 below, speaker A describes the hard work he had to put
in to redecorate a room in his house since the walls were coated with
several layers of wallpaper and paint. An approximate translation of
the example is given in italics and the transcription conventions are
provided at the end of this chapter.

Example 1
1 A: c'était tapissé peint [alors c'était l'enfer quoi] the wall was
papered, painted, so it was a nightmare

2 B: [ah ouais avant que t'enlèves les couches] oh yes, before you

can take off all the layers

3 A: oh putain j'ai mis j'ai mis un mois quoi /mh/ oh fuck it took

it took me a month /mh/