Sandra Benazzo

Chapter 16. The blossoming of negation in gesture, sign and oral productions

The study of the expression of negation in longitudinal data of adult-child conversations is a privileged locus to combine multimodal analyses of prosody, gesture, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. First negative constructions seem to take over from early gestures of rejection and avoidance, but tracing the transitions between actions and gestures, and between gestures and signed or vocal expressions in very young children is quite complex. This presentation will focus on multimodal analyses of negation in the productions of five children between the ages of 0;10 and 4;0 interacting with their parents in various linguistic environments (monolingual French, monolingual English, monolingual LSF, bilingual French/LSF). A specific coding system was developed, combining the use of Excel, CLAN and ELAN with the video data and the transcriptions in order to carry out micro and macro analyses of the functions of the different forms of negation according to context in dialogue. We will present the individual multimodal path of each child and illustrate the continuum between contrary actions, negative gestures, signed and vocal negative constructions.