A multimodal approach to markedness in spoken French

• Emphatic cues are used by speakers in complementary distribution in marked utterances.
• Prosodic focus is rarely co-occurrent with the thematic element in fronted syntactic constructions.
• Head beats and shakes as well as hand beats typically accompany prosodic emphasis.
• Metaphoric hand gestures typically accompany fronted syntactic constructions.

This study aims at examining the links between marked structures in the syntactic and prosodic domains (fronting and focal accent), and the way the two types of contrast can be reinforced by gestures. It was conducted on a corpus of 1h30 of spoken French, involving three pairs of speakers in dialogues. Results show that although the tendency is for marked constructions both in syntax and prosody not to be reinforced by gestures, there is still a higher proportion of gesture reinforcing with prosodic marking than with syntactic fronting. The paper describes which eyebrow and head movements as well as hand gestures are more liable to accompany the two operations. Beyond these findings, the study gives an insight into the current models proposed in the literature for gesture–speech production.