Gestures for me and you: A corpus study of Matukar Panau referential gestures

Matukar Panau (ISO 639-3: mjk) is an Oceanic language spoken in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea by a small number of people with dense social connections. As is the case with many languages, communication is primarily face-to-face, meaning interlocutors see and hear their conversational partners and it is in this context that the language has evolved. Our study centres on referential gestures, i.e. those that help to indicate or establish a referent. We focus on character viewpoint representational gestures (CVPT) and observer viewpoint representational gestures (OVPT). CVPT gestures are ones where a person uses their body to represent or model what an entity does. OVPT gestures are ones where a person uses their body to show what an observer would see. Research has shown that OVPT gestures are more strongly associated with less accessible referents, intransitive verbs and full lexical noun phrases in the speech stream. CVPT gestures are more strongly associated with accessible contexts, zero expression of referents and often co-occur with verbs, especially transitive ones, in the speech stream. We confirm the trends regarding verb transitivity, broaden these findings typologically to an understudied language and add in the effect of referent animacy and text genre.