French Face-to-Face Interaction: Repetition as a Multimodal Resource - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 160

What can be added in this example is that both Gesture 1 and
Gesture 2 are not redundant with the message content. When speaker
A produces Gesture 1, he is anticipating some assumption on the
part of speaker B who was narrating what happened at school. The
gesture in this context completes what is left unsaid in the elliptical
utterance, probably out of decency. Although speaker B repeats speaker
A's gesture (with Gesture 2), he contradicts the verbal assumption, so
that the gesture which was consistent with the initial verbal message
is repeated (as such gestures tend to be repeated as pointed out by
Mol et al., 2009), but then becomes quite inconsistent with the answer.
A gesture linked to the syntactic negation would rather have been
expected here. In this example, the prosodic level is in accordance with
the content of the utterances. In the first turn, speaker A formulates
the elliptical question with a low and trailing pitch and a very strong
lengthening on the last word that is typically used in unfinished turns.
By contrast, the next turn produced by B, starting with the answer
“no”, exhibits a rising-falling contour while at the same time speaker
B is repeating the gesture previously produced by A in the first turn.
Gesture 4 is also a repetition that comes together with the repetition
of the contradiction and this looks as what has sometimes been called
a hedge , i.e. a way of softening a contradiction, contradictions being
generally not preferred by interactants. It is interesting to note that the
same rising-falling contour is again produced by speaker B on “voyait”
( showed ) (which is also the second repetition of this word) as speaker
B is once again repeating speaker A's gesture. Therefore, we can say
that there is a complete dissociation between the double repetition of
the other participant's gesture by speaker B, and the contrast expressed
both in verbal content with two negations and prosody with the self-
repetition of the contrastive prosodic contour. Speaker B then develops
with “mais ça devait sentir” ( but it must have smelt ), an utterance which
is later repeated as well as a self-confirmation.

5.3 Cross-repetition

In example 3 below, the two speakers are discussing the arrangements
speaker A will make to look after the baby his wife is expecting.

Example 3
1 A: bien par exemple t'façon Laure elle est prof well, for example,

anyway, Laure is a teacher

2 A: donc elle travaille pas tu vois /ouais/ tout le tem[ps] so she

doesn't work, you see /yeah/ all the time

3 B: [to]ut le temps ouais all the time yeah