Аннотация:This paper contributes to the field of multimodal linguistics and discusses annotation of manual gestures in multichannel (multimodal) discourse, using a corpus of Russian discussions of the Pear Film (Chafe ed. 1980); the corpus is currently under construction (www.multidiscourse.ru). The study is based on a fully annotated subcorpus of 3 recordings, total time about one hour, with three participants in each recording. One of the key issues in gesture annotation is the importance of systematic distinction between communicatively significant gestures and general kinetic background. To address this issue, we introduce the notion of a speaker’s gesticulation portrait, involving properties such as (dis)inclination to stillness and to frequent use of physiologically motivated self-adaptors, as well as a set of habitual postures (“neutral hand positions”), serving as starting points for significant movements. An annotation scheme for the ELAN environment is proposed, allowing one to systematically annotate hierarchically organized gestural units as annotations in independent ELAN tiers: gesture chains, individual gestures, and gesture phases. Gesture phases are annotated separately for the left and the right hand; an individual gesture (sometimes called “gesture phrase”) is treated as a combined unit that can be one-handed or two-handed. To divide an ongoing stream of gesticulation into a series of gestures, annotators identify the points where kinetic features change. A simultaneous change of two or more parameters (effort, velocity, trajectory, movement direction, hand shape and orientation,
location in gesture space, etc.) marks a phase boundary; a change of several features points to a gesture boundary. A set of subordinate ELAN tiers is used to describe each gesture, including handedness, phase structure, multi-strokes, gesture overlaps, gesture repetitions, etc. As left and right hands movements are often asynchronous, a set of formal rules is proposed for such instances. On the basis of the annotated subcorpus evidence, quantitative observations were made concerning speakers’ preferences in gesture handedness. Three out of nine participants prefer (>60%) two-handed gestures, while six participants prefer either right- or left-handed gestures most of the time. While all the speakers identified themselves as right-handed persons, two of them show preference for the left hand (>63%); the degree of right hand preference varies strongly (from 60% to 97%). This data suggests that adding the “dominant hand” parameter for two-handed gestures may be quite useful. The proposed annotation scheme is oriented towards comparing manual gestures with units of other communication channels.