Exploring meaning-making practices via co-speech gestures in TED Talks

This study is based on and further develops research on co-speech gestures in a selection of TED Talks from various knowledge domains, so as to shed light and raise awareness on the orchestration of different modal resources therein and as a way of contributing to the development of multimodal literacy in an ever changing educational landscape (Masi, 2016, 2019a, in press). Data description is based on multimodal transcription through an integrated method (Lazaraton, 2004), which makes it possible to advance hypotheses about the interpretation of gestures in different contexts. The qualitative shows various ways in which speech-synchronised gestures in the talks can contribute different (also simultaneous) ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings or metafunctions (Halliday, 1978; Jewitt, 2014), especially when considered from a more global analytical perspective, viz. as repeated similar patterns over discourse chunks. Reference is also made to Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Ledin & Machin, 2018) as an overarching framework, as some of the patterns appear to have the potential not only to enhance cohesion but also to subtly emphasise emotional and value-laden meanings, thus pushing the highly persuasive discourse of this genre of talks forward.