2.1 Linguistics of negation

Horn (Reference Horn1989) cites ‘the traditional criteria for negativity’ in linguistic communication for some linguists as being ‘the presence of a negative particle, its appearance in a specified syntactic location, and so forth’ (p. 34). Negation in English, for example, is ‘marked by individual words (such as no, not, never) or by affixes within a word (such as -n’t, un-, non-)’ (Huddleston & Pullum, Reference Huddleston and Pullum2005, p. 149; original emphasis). Syntactically, these negative items tend to occur as early in the sentence as possible and to be reinforced (Jespersen, Reference Jespersen1917), leading to related linguistic phenomena like negative polarity items, such as any, even, ever and at all (Lawler, Reference Lawler2005). Introducing negative forms and their contractions to an utterance is known to impose positional constraints on other elements ‘downstream’ in syntax through constructs and operations that include the ‘scope’ and ‘focus’ of negation (Horn, Reference Horn1989). The scope of negation refers to the spread of negation through the utterance following a negative particle or item and indicates as per Huddleston and Pullum (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2005) ‘the part of the sentence that the negative applies to semantically’ (p. 156), while the focus of negation denotes ‘the part of that scope that is most prominently or explicitly negated’ (Huddleston and Pullum, Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002, p. 790). For Horn and Wansing (Reference Horn, Wansing, Zalta and Nodelman2022), ‘Negation is in the first place a phenomenon of semantic opposition’ (p. 1). It can be classified from a range of perspectives, such as grammatical–typological (e.g. verbal/non-verbal, clausal/sub-clausal, analytic/synthetic, ordinary/meta-linguistic; Huddleston and Pullum, Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002; Miestamo, Reference Miestamo, Aikhenvald and Dixon2017) and pragmatic, which relates to the functions of negation including ‘denial, rejection, and related notions like correction, disapproval, stop, prohibition, failure, refusal, etc.’ (Prieto & Espinal, Reference Prieto, Espinal, Deprez and Espinal2020, p. 667; see also Beaupoil-Hourdel et al., Reference Beaupoil-Hourdel, Morgenstern, Boutet, Larrivee and Lee2016, pp. 98–99). A number of these aspects of linguistic negation have appeared in studies of prosody.

2.2 Prosody and negation

Prosody is understood by Brown and Prieto (Reference Brown, Prieto, Haugh, Kádár and Terkourafi2021) as ‘vocal effects that accompany the sounds of individual segments of speech, and that extend over words, phrases or utterances’ noting how prosody ‘allows for the same word, phrase or utterance to be delivered in different ways, such as louder/quieter, faster/slower, with higher or lower pitch, or with different intonation contours’ (pp. 431–432). Such vocal effects arise from changes in the speaker’s body and are physically manifest in the acoustic signal (sound wave) of speech. What we perceive as pitch and volume, for instance, refers to characteristics of this sound wave affected by different articulatory and physiological efforts as well as by the environment or medium through which sound travels. Pitch height often refers to changes in the frequency of the sound wave due to the rate at which the speaker’s vocal folds are vibrating in the larynx known as fundamental frequency (F0), measured in the acoustic signal as hertz (Hz) or cycles per second. This cycle of vibration involves the opening and closing of the vocal folds in the glottis (the ‘glottic cycle’). The quicker these vocal folds vibrate, the higher the perceived pitch, though factors other than F0 may contribute to the perception of pitch. Changes in volume (more technically ‘loudness’) refer to changes in the amplitude or height of the sound wave, which represents the intensity of acoustic energy measured in decibels (dB). Intensity can be affected by the relative amount of air coming through the glottis from the speaker’s lungs (pulmonic flow) and his or her ‘vocal effort’ or ‘force’ (i.e. shouting).

In their research overview, Prieto and Espinal (Reference Prieto, Espinal, Deprez and Espinal2020) synthesize studies of the relation between prosody and negation markers as well as negative node and scope. They discuss studies of interactive speech showing that ‘the locus of negation is almost always marked with a high pitch accent’ (p. 681) and how ‘prosodic patterns strongly interact with sentence interpretation’ (p. 684). The tendency of negative particles to be accented syllables brings a range of prosodic phenomena into view such as stress, i.e. the ‘property of a syllable which may, depending on the language, mark it as more prominent than its neighbours’ (De Jong, Reference de Jong1995, p. 491). According to De Jong’s (Reference de Jong1995) overview of linguistic stress, syllables that are stressed arise from a range of articulatory behaviour in the speaker’s vocal tract: articulatory gestures are more flexible (as opposed to stiff), sharper (exhibits less coarticulation effects), louder (increased intensity) and longer (aimed at increased sonority). This accentual lengthening is reviewed by Turk and White (Reference Turk and White1999), who note that while ‘an F0 excursion associated with a lexically stressed syllable is considered to be the primary cue to phrasal stress, duration is considered to be an important secondary cue’ and, furthermore, that ‘initial consonants showed a greater degree of lengthening than final consonants’ (p. 173). For Klatt (Reference Klatt1976), segmental duration was not secondary but ‘one of the primary cues to the existence and location of emphasized or contrastively stressed material’ (p. 1219).

Lengthening of syllable onset consonants for emphasis (as opposed to for contrast) is explored in Niebuhr’s (Reference Niebuhr2010) study of intensifying emphasis in German. Through studies of read speech with ‘target’ syllables indicated for stress, lengthening was linked to a form of semantic–pragmatic emphasis called ‘negative intensification’ with statistically reliable effects. Greater lengthening of consonants preceded short vowels compared to long ones, for example. ‘Emphasis for intensity means the semantics of the word that bears the emphasis is intensified’, with negatively valenced intensity occurring with words such as ‘stupid’, ‘drunk’, ‘idiotic’ and ‘lousy’ (pp. 172–173).Footnote ⁶ The documented phonetic profiles of accented syllables were the basis for Niebuhr to propose a form–meaning correspondence of consonant lengthening and negatively valenced sentiment, which Ward (Reference Ward2019) subsequently relates to iconicity in his typology of ‘likely primordial mappings’ of prosodic meaning (pp. 57–60). However, the target syllables in that study did not include explicit negative particles, so the intuitive link between negative intensification and linguistic negation was missed (words such as ‘stupid’, ‘drunk’ and ‘idiotic’ have been typologically classed as harbouring ‘implicit’ or ‘covert’ negation).

Although articulatory behaviours such as lengthening have long been referred to as ‘gestural’ (cf. ‘gestural theory of speech production’; De Jong, Reference de Jong1995) and can be induced in ‘virtually the same’ way by the occurrence of rhythmic manual, head or eyebrow ‘beat’ gestures with implications for perceived prominence (c.f., Krahmer & Swerts, Reference Krahmer and Swerts2007, p. 42), they have not been closely related to the study of other bodily gestures associated with negation.

2.3 Gesture and negation

Rich observations on gesture’s links with negation have long featured in the work of key thinkers and texts on human communication, such as in Darwin’s (Reference Darwin1872) The Expression of Emotions in Man and Other Animals and in the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilianus (see Kendon, Reference Kendon2004). Examples of gestures that have been associated with spoken language negation include the headshake (with its notorious cultural variations; Harrison, Reference Harrison, Müller, Cienki, Fricke, Ladewig, McNeill and Bressem2014b) and facial expressions like the ‘not face’ (Benitez-Quiroz et al., Reference Benitez-Quiroz, Wilbur and Martinez2016). However, various manual gestures striking outwards from the body or raised with open palms towards the addressee have received much more attention and analysis in gesture studies (Boutet et al., Reference Boutet, Blondel, Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern2021; Bressem & Müller, Reference Bressem, Müller, Müller, Cienki, Fricke, Ladewig, McNeill and Bressem2014; Reference Bressem and Müller2017; Calbris, Reference Calbris2005; Reference Calbris2011; Harrison, Reference Harrison2018; Kendon, Reference Kendon2004; Lapaire, Reference Lapaire, Bonnefille and Salbeyre2006).

Multimodal treatments of these gestures have demonstrated how they interrelate and work together with the linguistics and pragmatics of negation during spoken communication (for overviews, see Harrison, Reference Harrison and Cienki2024; Prieto & Espinal, Reference Prieto, Espinal, Deprez and Espinal2020). Quite consistently across several languages, gestures have been kinesically related to the dialogic contexts of use in which negation is being expressed (Kendon, Reference Kendon2004) as well as with the conceptual semiotics and cognitive etymology of negation (Calbris, Reference Calbris2011; Lapaire, Reference Lapaire, Bonnefille and Salbeyre2006). Building on these authors and working with a corpus of German speech, Bressem and Müller (Reference Bressem, Müller, Müller, Cienki, Fricke, Ladewig, McNeill and Bressem2014) identified different patterns of gestures whose forms can be interpreted as cognitively and semiotically motivated by underlying actions that all involve movements away from one’s body (sweeping away, holding away, brushing away and throwing away) and showed their association with different negative meanings and functions. Calbris (Reference Calbris2011), on the other hand, treats gestures like ‘sweeping away’ and ‘holding away’ as examples of ‘polysemous gestures’ with ‘plural motivation’. In the case of ‘sweeping away’, its meaning depends on the component of the level hand that is salient or profiled by the given context (such as its movement trajectory or shape configuration). This determines the analogical link established with a physical correlate, which in turn is the source of the gesture’s meaning and array of subsequent semantic derivations (Calbris, Reference Calbris2011, p. 183). Based on a purely physiological analysis of this gesture (‘lateral sweep’), however, Boutet (Reference Boutet2015, Reference Boutet2018) argues that the source of its core meaning is generated on the hand.

Focusing on the timing and organization of such gestures with respect to the grammatical structures of co-occurring negative sentences, Harrison (Reference Harrison2018) worked out a heuristics for the synchronization of gesture with respect to linguistic negation, presenting evidence that the positional constraints imposed by grammatical negation, namely negative node, scope and focus, also extend to the organization and timing of gesture (Chapter 3). Although negative particles involve accented syllables (cf. Section 2.2), which Rohrer et al. (Reference Rohrer, Tütüncübasi, Vilà-Giménez, Florit-Pons, Esteve-Gibert, Ren, Shattuck-Hufnagel and Prieto2023) include among ‘prosodic landmarks for gesture production’ (p. 26), these heuristics did not link the temporal constraints on gestures associated with negation to prosody. In fact, the relationship between prosody and gesture was not considered in-depth by the above gesture studies of negation, including by researchers proposing the universal ‘not face’ (Benitez-Quiroz et al., Reference Benitez-Quiroz, Wilbur and Martinez2016).

2.4 Multimodal negation

The interplay of grammatical, gestural and prosodic patterns of negation has been specifically explored in at least two lines of studies. Focusing on the comprehension of negative sentences that cognitively are not straightforward to process, a programme of psycholinguistic research has explored how the coordination of prosodic and gestural patterns mentioned above may affect the interpretation of negation and their role in ambiguity resolution (Brown & Kamiya, Reference Brown and Kamiya2019; Li et al., Reference Li, González-Fuente, Prieto and Espinal2016; Prieto et al., Reference Prieto, Borràs-Comes, Tubau and Espinal2013; Prieto & Espinal, Reference Prieto, Espinal, Deprez and Espinal2020; Tubau et al., Reference Tubau, González-Fuente, Prieto and Espinal2015). Influenced by previous studies of gestural negation, researchers draw their patterns of linguistic, gestural and prosodic forms from elicited utterances and then create audio–visual stimuli that manipulate the coordination of different resources. Through a perceptual study of sentences that are ambiguous as to single or double negation, for example, Prieto et al. (Reference Prieto, Borràs-Comes, Tubau and Espinal2013) demonstrated that ‘prosodic and non-verbal cues (i.e. gestural patterns) crucially affect the interpretation of isolated n-words’ (p. 147). This effect has been explored in the interpretation of answers to negative yes/no questions in Catalan (Tubau et al., Reference Tubau, González-Fuente, Prieto and Espinal2015), of rejections to negative assertions/questions in Mandarin Chinese (Li et al., Reference Li, González-Fuente, Prieto and Espinal2016) and of negation and quantification (Brown & Kamiya, Reference Brown and Kamiya2019). In these studies, negation is treated as a linguistic meaning or function and its understanding is conceived of as the perceiver’s ability to make the correct inference or judgement of the speaker’s intended meaning based on integrating multisensory stimuli, although not taking into account bodily feeling.

An example from Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern’s (Reference Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern2021) recent study of ‘shrug’ gestures in family interactions can illustrate the findings from a line of multimodal negation research during language development. An exasperated child responds to persistent questioning from Mum concerning the whereabouts of a toy with ‘euh je sais pas!’ (er I don’t know!; lit. I know not). She ‘couples’ this utterance with a ‘composite gesture’ comprising ‘three distinct forms: a palm-up on both hands, a shoulder lift, and a head tilt’ (p. 212). Analysing this gesture kinesiologically (Boutet, Reference Boutet2015, Reference Boutet2018; Morgenstern et al., Reference Morgenstern, Chevrefils, Blondel, Vincent, Thomas, Jego and Boutet2021) ‘as movement that flows from one body part (a segment) to the next’ (p. 188), and observing this flow’s relation with prosody and lexico-grammar, Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern explain that the part ‘je sais’ (I know) ‘follows a rising prosodic contour and is produced timely with the scope of the shoulder lift’, while the negation word ‘“pas” follows a falling contour with the lengthening of the vowel when Madeleine’s body collapses’ (p. 212). The researchers analyse the gesture’s significance in terms of its function, which they interpret by ‘taking into consideration the context of interaction, the immediate previous utterance and the feedback and recast provided by the co-speaker’, attributing a designated meaning according to their coding scheme as ‘absence’, ‘affective’ and/or ‘epistemic’ (Beaupoil-Hourdel & Morgenstern, Reference Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern2021, pp. 189–190). Coupling of prosody and gesture in such utterances is viewed as evidence of the child’s increasing control of distinct symbolic resources and their integration along a social, cultural and cognitive developmental trajectory towards sophisticated multimodal utterances (‘the blossoming of multimodal negation’; Beaupoil-Hourdel et al., Reference Beaupoil-Hourdel, Morgenstern, Boutet, Larrivee and Lee2016, p. 99).

We can now turn to research that views the coupling of prosody and gesture from a different perspective, that of ‘interactions between sub-processes of organism-persons’ (Thibault, Reference Thibault2021, p. 194), namely between forelimb motion and respiratory–vocal systems.

2.5 Gesture–speech biomechanics and vocal-entangled gestures associated with negation

Research into gesture–speech physics has conducted experiments and synthesized findings from neural processes, biomechanics and social interaction to develop a ‘multilevel multimodal approach’ to gesture and prosody (Reference Pouw, Proksch, Drijvers, Gamba, Holler, Kello, Schaefer and WigginsPouw et al., 2021; cf. Pouw, de Jonge-Hoekstra, et al., Reference Pouw, de Jonge-Hoekstra, Harrison, Paxton and Dixon2020a; Pouw, Harrison, et al., Reference Pouw, Harrison, Esteve-Gibert and Dixon2020b, Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, Pouw et al., Reference Pouw, Werner, Burchardt and Selen2024). Of interest here is the ‘gesture–speech biomechanics thesis’, which stems from empirical evidence that ‘when an upper-limb segment with a certain mass (or multiple segments with a certain combined mass) sufficiently accelerates or decelerates, it yields physical impulses on the musculoskeletal system, the cascading mechanical effects of which will constraining respiratory–vocal activity’ (Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 4). The thesis is that ‘gesture-speech synchrony may be grounded in biomechanical linkages between upper limb movement and the respiratory system’ (Pouw, Harrison, et al., Reference Pouw, Harrison, Esteve-Gibert and Dixon2020b, p. 1243). The researchers refer to these linkages as ‘vocal-entangled gestures’, showing them to be ‘present in ontogeny, have deep roots in phylogeny, and have natural communicative significance’ (Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 13).

As gesture–speech physics and related experiments have shown, these constraints contribute to many of the acoustic effects traditionally measured for prosody, even unintentionally. These include change in fundamental frequency, intensity of phonation and duration. In one oft-cited study, for instance, Krahmer and Swerts (Reference Krahmer and Swerts2007) asked participants to vary how they say ‘Amanda gaat naar Malta’ (Amanda goes to Malta) by placing ‘acoustic pitch accent’ and/or performing a ‘visual beat gesture’ on either ‘Amanda’ or ‘Malta’. Their analyses of these target words in PRAAT show that pitch accents and beat gesture led to ‘virtually the same’ acoustic effects, such as increased duration of the /a/ segments in the syllable receiving accent or beat (amAnda/mAlta). The mechanical effects found to cascade from gestural forelimb movements affect the musculoskeletal system in other ways too, yielding a range of peripheral actions called anticipatory postural adjustments. For example, ‘performing an upper limb movement recruits a whole kinetic chain of muscle activity around the trunk (e.g., the rectus abdominis) to maintain posture’ (Pouw, de Jonge-Hoekstra, et al., Reference Pouw, de Jonge-Hoekstra, Harrison, Paxton and Dixon2020a, p. 91). In experiments where subjects were fitted with respiratory belts, gesturing was also found to affect the respiratory system (Pouw, Harrison, et al., Reference Pouw, Harrison, Esteve-Gibert and Dixon2020b). The lungs and the ribcage are ‘so tightly connected’ and separated only by a ‘fluid-filled pleural space, which acts as a vacuum’, so ‘any motion affecting the ribcage, like moving the arm during gesturing, can have a (small) effect on lung volume and subglottal pressure’ (Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 4; emphasis original). The fact that ‘actions happening locally’ like gesture ‘can reverberate more globally’ is referred to as ‘tensegrity’ (Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 4). Multiple factors influence how any single gesture reverberates through the body. Those demonstrated experimentally include size of gesture (‘higher-impulse arm movement vs lower impulse wrist movement’), deceleration/acceleration of gesture and posture of speaker (‘gestural effects on acoustics were more pronounced when participants were standing vs sitting’; Pouw, Harrison, et al., Reference Pouw, Harrison, Esteve-Gibert and Dixon2020b, p. 1232).

Happily, Pouw and Fuchs (Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022) use the negative utterance ‘no way’ to illustrate the cascading mechanical effects on respiratory-related muscle systems of a gesture described anatomically as ‘external–internal rotation of the humerus’ (p. 3; emphasis original). In their illustration (cropped and reproduced in Figure 1), this utterance involves a visibly stressed negative item (‘no’) and a gesture recognizable from studies of multimodal negation as a ‘lateral sweep’ (cf. Section 2.3). The physical impulse (PI) of this gesture is visualized by emphasis arrows at the endpoint of the gesture’s sweep, which corresponds with the ‘apex’ of a unidirectional gesture stroke (Rohrer et al., Reference Rohrer, Tütüncübasi, Vilà-Giménez, Florit-Pons, Esteve-Gibert, Ren, Shattuck-Hufnagel and Prieto2023). The dashes annotated underneath ‘no way’ suggest that the full gesture excursion (i.e. the ‘gesture unit’; Kendon, Reference Kendon2004) was organized with respect to the lexico-grammar of negation (a ‘grammar–gesture nexus’; Harrison, Reference Harrison2018; Lapaire, Reference Lapaire2011). The image is montaged alongside the ‘myofascial chain’ of connective tissues running through the different muscle groups potentially recruited by this gesture.

Figure 1. The biomechanics of a well-known multimodal negation (images from Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 3).

Circling back to multimodal studies of negation, relevant here is the kinesiological perspective on gesture developed by Boutet (Reference Boutet2018), who has analysed the articulatory (joint) physiology of this gesture form and its association with negation (Boutet, Reference Boutet2015; Boutet et al., Reference Boutet, Blondel, Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern2021). In addition to the external–internal rotation of the humerus (upper arm bone) indicated by Pouw and Fuchs, Boutet (Reference Boutet2015) specifies that such gestures ‘present a position or movement of pronation and adduction of the hand’ (p. 126). Boutet’s analyses further describe articulatory reverberation in arguing that ‘the movement propagation flow [along the upper limb] seems to be distal-proximal’ (p. 126), i.e. from hand to shoulder. This is Boutet’s basis to argue that this gesture’s attested negative meanings (rejection, refusal, negation) ‘emanate’ from the hand.

While Boutet’s kinesiological approach associates articulatory physiology with felt-bodily meaning that informs gesture, the biomechanical analysis by Pouw and Fuchs (Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022) relates articulatory physiology with prosody by asking ‘how can gestures reach the vocal system?’ (p. 3). Their answer helps to see that a gesture with rotating humerus reverberates beyond the upper limb segments spelled out by Boutet, as it involves chest and back muscles that ‘will constrain the rib cage’ and ‘can affect respiratory functions’ (Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 3). By indicating that the physical impulse creating these constraints and affects for the lateral sweep occurs with the speaker’s accented ‘no’, the demonstration also implies acoustic consequences of the lateral sweep for vocalization of ‘no’. This link was not made explicit, however, nor were consequences of the lateral sweep for other systems, such as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system that pulls facial expressions.

2.6 Current study

To address the gaps and issues raised by the foregoing overview, the current study identified multimodal negation as an ecological context in which vocal-entangled gesture can be inferred. The target data are utterances that involve the recognizable lateral sweep gesture and an accented negative item. The analysis to be performed involves examining selected utterances in visualization software (ELAN and PRAAT) to identify how the kinesthetic and acoustic dynamics correspond as the accented word and gesture materialize. The following section describes how such utterances were discovered and selected in order to make a study of vocal-entangled gesture with qualitative methods and ecological data feasible.

4.1 Quantitative results

Table 1 presents acoustic measurements of duration (ms), pitch (Hz) and intensity (dB) during initial lengthening of the voiced alveolar nasal consonant /n/ for each of the eight examples. The statistics demonstrate that the lengthened consonants also have a pitch and intensity rise.

Table 1. Acoustic measurements of duration (ms), pitch (Hz) and intensity (dB) during initial lengthening of the voiced alveolar nasal consonant /n/

Contrary to predictions based on Niebuhr’s (Reference Niebuhr2010) phonetic profiles of negative emphasis, the duration of lengthened onset consonants for the current set of examples was shorter when followed by a short vowel (/ɛ/) and longer when followed by the longer diphthong (/oʊ/). As shown in Table 2, the average onset consonant lengthening of the first syllable of ‘never’ (/n/ preceding short vowel /ɛ/) was 274 ms, while the average onset consonant lengthening of ‘no’ (/n/ preceding diphthong /oʊ/) was 327.3 ms. Average pitch and intensity rises were also greater when lengthening was followed by the diphthong.

Table 2. Average duration, pitch rise and intensity rise during onset consonant of negation word

The next section will contextualize these measures and values by exploring their correspondence with other aspects of the speakers’ bodily motion, especially forelimb gesturing and facial distortion.

4.2 Qualitative analyses of vocal-entangled gesture at accented negative item onset

The qualitative analysis of examples serves to show that in all the selected utterances to some extent as syllable–onset consonant is lengthening with vocal fold vibration and pulmonic flow increasing (NNNNNN), the speaker’s humerus is rotating with hand pronating, adducting and extending, while face is deforming. Two sets of examples will be presented, the first involving utterances with the negative particle ‘never’ and the second with the particle ‘no’. This organization explores body motion’s entanglement in two different acoustic environments of the accented syllable, offering three examples from each environment.

4.2.1 Examples with clausal negation ‘never’ (/n/ precedes short mid-front unrounded vowel /ɛ/)

For example, lexico-grammatical pattern is clausal negation, specifically ‘standard negation’ (‘negation of declarative main clauses with a verbal predicate’; Miestamo, Reference Miestamo, Aikhenvald and Dixon2017, p. 406). As forelimb gesture is preparing in examples with ‘never’, consonant is lengthening (with pitch and intensity both rising), cheeks are raising, lips are stretching and eyelids are closing/squinting.

Example 1 (It’s) never been said.Footnote ¹⁰

Our first example was discovered during the opening monologue to an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the context of a joke about Thanksgiving side dishes. The utterance ‘(it) has never been said’ is the host Jimmy’s answer to his rhetorical question ‘ever heard anyone say pass the green bean casserole?’ (Transcript 1, line 2). In terms of the overall prosodic profile visible in the PRAAT window, the expression ‘never been’ exhibits a plateaux-like shape F0 contour with clear intensity peaks on each syllable. Slope of F0 (77.5 Hz) and first intensity peak (7.4 dB) start rising during lengthening of syllable–onset consonant /n/ (235 ms). This corresponds with the speaker’s internal rotation of the humerus (manual gesture preparation phase) as cheeks are raising, lips are stretching and eyelids are closing/squinting (Figure 2a). It turns out to be preparation for a unidirectional gesture stroke beginning with the vowel onset (/ɛ/). As ‘(n)ever’ is uttered, the stroke involves external rotation of the humerus (‘lateral sweep’; Figure 2b). This stroke reaches its apex (endpoint) with ‘been’ (which has an intensity peak) and is held with ‘been said’. Jimmy’s face undergoes changes during this part of utterance due to mouthing constraints from vocalizing but does not fully relax until completion of post-stroke hold (eyes and lips maintain degrees of squinting and stretching). Zooming into the F0 and intensity contours, bobbles become visible at onset (max acceleration) and offset (max deceleration) of gesture stroke (Table 3).

Transcript 1

1. 1. even the people who like green bean casserole do not like green bean casserole

2. 2. ever heard anybody say pass the green bean casserole (it’s) never been said

3. 3. I had an argument though in the office today

Example 2. Trump never had any evidence of fraud.Footnote ¹¹

Figure 2. (a) Image from left boundary of stroke phase (internal medial rotation). (b) Image from right boundary of stroke phase (external lateral rotation).

Table 3. Acoustic measurements for Example 1

The second example ‘Trump never had any evidence of fraud’ was sourced from the ‘Closer Look’ monologue segment of Late Night with Seth Meyers. This utterance appears in a subordinate that-clause as the direct object of the sentence ‘Powell essentially admitted to prosecutors’ (Transcript 2, line 2). In this acoustic profile, ‘never had’ exhibits a plateaux-like shape F0 peak with clear intensity peaks on each syllable. Syllable–onset consonant /n/ is lengthened for 235 ms, during which time both F0 and intensity rise (respectively, 27.1 Hz and 5.7 dB). As in the first example, it is when lengthening syllable–onset consonant with increased vocal fold vibration and pulmonic flow that speaker is rotating the humerus (internal) of both hands while his cheeks are raising, lips are stretching and eyelids are closing/squinting (Figure 3a). Uttering of ‘(n)ever had’ likewise involves humerus rotating (now external) without face relaxing (though changing due to mouthing) until completion of stroke at onset of ‘had’ and instant retraction (Figure 3b). No acoustic bobble can be seen at the endpoint of stroke, which smoothly transitions to rest without any post-stroke hold (Table 4).

Transcript 2

1. 1. for example Powell essentially admitted to prosecutors

2. 2. that Trump never had any evidence of fraud

3. 3. nor did he even attempt to provide any evidence of fraud

4. 4. except for when he claimed he saw something weird on his TV

Example 3: This you may never have heard before.Footnote ¹²

Figure 3. (a) Image from left boundary of stroke phase. (b) Image from right boundary of stroke phase.

Table 4. Acoustic measurements for Example 2

Our third example is this article’s title track, the utterance ‘this you may never have heard before’ from an extract of the Television Show Celebs Go Dating. Footnote ¹³ The dating agent Paul has planned to ‘call out’ his client Miles (from Made in Chelsea) for ‘acting with his dates’. Seated opposite Miles, he is going to say ‘I believe you are selfish’ (Transcript 1, line 5). To soften this face-threatening call out, Paul first says ‘this you may never have heard before’ with a plateaux-like shape F0 peak over ‘never have heard’ involving intensity peaks on each syllable (line 4). With focus-fronted ‘this’, Paul has a ‘precision grip’ gesture (Kendon, Reference Kendon2004, Ch. 12). This is from where a palm down gesture emerges whose stroke occurs with ‘never’. While saying ‘you may’, thus, Paul’s hands are pronating, abducting and extending with some internal rotating of the humerus. This continues while lengthening the negative syllable–onset consonant /n/ (317 ms) with F0 and intensity increasing (respectively, 37.2 Hz / 5.7 dB), while cheeks are raising, lips are stretching and eyelids are closing/squinting (Figure 4a). Acceleration of hands into the gesture stroke begin with vowel onset, as Paul’s humerus rotates externally and facial musculature relaxes (Figure 4b). Bobbles in pitch contour are visible at onset (max acceleration) and offset (max deceleration) of gesture stroke (Table 5).

Transcript 3.

1. 1. Paul: there’s something i have wanted to tell you miles

2. 2. Miles: oh god yeah

3. 3. Paul: here’s the deal here’s the deal

4. 4. this you may never have heard before

5. 5. I am going to tell you something

6. 6. this is from the bottom of my heart

7. 7. i believe you are selfish

Figure 4. (a) Image from left boundary of stroke phase (i.e. right boundary of pre-stroke hold). (b) Image from right boundary of stroke phase (i.e. left boundary of second stroke phase).

Table 5. Acoustic measurements for Example 3

4.2.2 Examples with ‘no’ (/n/ precedes diphthong /oʊ/ starting with mid-back rounded vowel /o/)

The next set of examples involves the negative item ‘no’ with its diphthong /oʊ/. On average, these examples show comparatively greater lengthening of onset consonant (avg. 337.3) with higher rises in F0 and intensity during the lengthening (avg. 125 Hz and 173 dB, respectively). They allow us to see different facial distortion during onset lengthening with forelimb gesture preparing, one source of which appears to be articulatory rounding of the negative particle’s vowel. In these examples, more specifically, as syllable–onset consonant is lengthening with vocal fold vibration and pulmonic flow increasing, the speaker’s humerus is rotating with hand pronating and adducting. Lips are funnelling, while eyelids are raising (as sometimes are eyebrows). In terms of lexico-grammatical pattern, this second set of examples is negative by virtue of a nuclear negative word in subject position (Examples 5–7).

Example 5. Nobody laughs.

Our first example of this scenario was perceived while enjoying a widely viewed video on YouTube called Jamie Foxx Roasted Mike Tyson to His Face from the Foxx’s interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Footnote ¹⁴ The segment of interest begins with Foxx setting the scene by saying ‘so I’m in the hood and I’m killing LA and I get to my Mike Tyson joke and that’s where I usually like get a standing ovation’ (lines 1–4). He now says ‘and when I get to the joke’ (line 5), pauses and then says ‘nobody laughs’ (line 6). The audience laugh (line 7), then Foxx repeats ‘nobody’ (line 8) and asks rhetorically ‘you know why?’ (line 9). He answers ‘because Mike Tyson is in the building’ (line 10). The acoustic measurements for Foxx’s two ‘nobody’ are shown in Table 6.

Table 6. Acoustic measurements for Example 4

Focusing on the first instance, Foxx’s gesture stroke is timed with the diphthong /oʊ/ of ‘nobody’ (instance 5a, Table 6). This first syllable’s rime also sees pitch and intensity peaks. Its onset involves a lengthened buzz of the voiced alveolar nasal consonant /n/. At nearly half a second duration (434 ms), this is the longest one in the current set of examples. This buzz enfolds an F0 rise of 51.2 Hz and intensity rise of 21 dB, which are also relatively large (cf. Table 1). This intensified and pitched sound lengthening is prefaced with an audible inhalation (.hhhh). These vocal–tract behaviours correspond with the preparation phase of a two-handed ‘lateral sweep’ gesture and facial activity involving lip rounding (Figure 5a). Foxx’s whole upper body is therefore inflating and lifting, suggesting evidence for the ‘tight relations between respiration-related activity and vocalization’ (Pouw, de Jonge-Hoekstra, et al., Reference Pouw, de Jonge-Hoekstra, Harrison, Paxton and Dixon2020a, p. 1231). Chest circumference is included among the ‘respiratory kinematic changes’ known to be ‘amplified by upper body limb movement’ (Pouw & Fuchs, Reference Pouw and Fuchs2022, p. 5). Gestural stroke is during the syllable’s rime (the diphthong /oʊ/) while facial distortion maintains rounding or ‘funnelling’ of the lips and eyelids raising (Figure 5b). Note these are different facial distortions from when the syllable rime was the / ɛ / of ‘never’.

Transcript 5.

1. 1 so I’m in the hood and I’m doing this joke

2. 2 and I’m killing LA (2ZP)

3. 3 and I get to my Mike Tyson joke and

4. 4 that’s where I usually like get a standing ovation

5. 5 and when I get to the joke

6. 6 .hhhhnobody laughs

7. 7 (audience laughter)

8. 8 nobody

9. 9 you know why

10. 10 because Mike Tyson is in the building

Figure 5. (a) Image from right boundary of gesture preparation phase qua left boundary of stroke phase. (b) Image from right boundary of gesture stroke phase qua left boundary of post-stroke hold phase.

Comparing Foxx’s two instances of ‘nobody’, they both have initial lengthening. There is no in-breath with the repetition, which is only half as long (222 ms compared to 434 ms), yet this repeated, shorter ‘nobody’ has a steeper pitch rise (63.6 Hz). They have similar changes in intensity or volume (difference of 2.3 dB). The total duration of the first ‘nobody’ is 860 ms, which means the lengthening of onset accounts for 50%. The second nobody is 691 ms, which means the lengthening of onset accounts for 32%.

Example 6. Literally no one.Footnote ¹⁵

Our next example with ‘no’ is from an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert called Kevin McCarthy’s Groundhog Day. Colbert opens his monologue by satirising American politician Kevin McCarthy’s failed attempts to be elected as speaker of the house. After turning to his set hand to check ‘the house did they fail again?’ (line 1), Colbert addresses the camera to say ‘no one, no one, literally no one’ (lines 2–4), parenthetically remarking ‘and I called people who know things’ (line 5), then completing his utterance ‘no one knows what happens now’ (line 6). Each ‘no one’ is timed with a repeated stroke of one-handed ‘lateral sweep’ gestures (Figure 6a–c). Table 7 includes specific measures of duration, pitch and intensity for the negative item receiving greatest accentuation, while Figure 6a montages data from ELAN and PRAAT to visualize acoustic and kinesthetic phenomena. Duration of the voiced alveolar nasal consonant /n/ increases with each repetition: 115, 141 and 340 ms. Increases in F0 and intensity are similarly commensurate, the third instance having both the biggest pitch rise (244.6 Hz) and biggest intensity rise (26.3 dB) in this study’s selection of utterances. In this example, thus, the longer the duration, the bigger the pitch rise. Gesturally, the third instance also has a marked preparation phase corresponding with the modifier ‘literally’. As can be seen from the screenshots (Figure 6a–c), Colbert’s lips are funnelling while eyelids and brows are raising.

Transcript 6.

1. 1 the house did they fail again okay good

2. 2 no one

3. 3 no one

4. 4 literally no one

5. 5 and I called people who know things

6. 6 no one knows what happens now

7. 7 here’s what we do know

8. 8 it’s fantastic

Table 7. Acoustic measurements for Example 6

Figure 6. (a) Image from right boundary of gesture preparation phase qua left boundary of stroke phase. (b) Image from stroke phase. (c) Image from right boundary of stroke phase qua left boundary of post-stroke hold phase.

Example 7. No one with any level of a brain.Footnote ¹⁶

In this video clip found circulating on YouTube Shorts, online personality Emily Wilson shares her perception of women who earn money by trading explicit videos of themselves on sites such as Only Fans. Speaking about the longer-term relationship prospects for young adult content creators, EW’s concern is that ‘no one with any level of like a brain would ever respect somebody who does that’ (lines 3–4). As her syllable–onset consonant /n/ is lengthening (297 ms), F0 and intensity are increasing (122.3 Hz/7.9 dB) (Table 8). Both the speaker’s humerus bones are rotating internally with hands pronating and adducting, as her face is deforming with lips funnelling and brows lowering (Figure 7, image on left). This is preparation for a lateral sweep variant involving both hands (referred to elsewhere as 2PDmid; Harrison, Reference Harrison2018, pp. 33–39), which in this instance also exhibits some ‘recoil’ at stroke apex (Figure 7, image on right; Rohrer et al., Reference Rohrer, Tütüncübasi, Vilà-Giménez, Florit-Pons, Esteve-Gibert, Ren, Shattuck-Hufnagel and Prieto2023, p. 28). EW holds her open hand-prone gesture momentarily before preparing and holding palm-up gestures with the rest of her utterance.

Transcript 7.

1. 1 You’re going to hit the real world eventually

2. 2 It’s just a matter of time

3. 3 And no one with any level of like a brain

4. 4 Would ever respect somebody who does that

Figure 7. Image from left and right boundary of stroke phase (before hold).

Table 8. Acoustic measurements for Example 7