ON GESTURAL NEGATION IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

The article focuses on the topic of correlation between a word and a gesture in standard and the most frequent constructions with negation of a predicate. The article consists of two parts. The first part discusses negative constructions “ne [not] + predicate” and analyzes consistent patterns typical for choosing negative gestures. The second part describes constructions with deep negation, i.e. contexts without a negative construction on the surface, but accompanied with negative gestures. The research has been conducted using the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO). The research procedure is based on defining linguistic features in negative constructions and constructions with deep negation: a) semantics of lexical units related to gestural negation, b) syntactic structures, c) morphological components d) rhythmic features. Thus we assign every sample from the gestural database with a number of its linguistic characteristics in an utterance accompanying the gestures or the lack of such. With the help of statistical parameters, we determine which linguistic characteristics are essential for the presence or the lack of gestural negation and its quality (the body organ that performs it), and interpret all the statistical consistencies.