The emergence of verbal-gestural metaphors in Brazilian Portuguese video lessons

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze verbo-gestural metaphors occurrences in video lessons about Portuguese language grammar. The theoretical framework is composed of scholars who investigate metaphor from a cognitive and multimodal perspective (Müller, 2008; Cienki, 2008; Avelar; Cienki, 2023), as well as the concept of catchment (gestural network) proposed by McNeill (2005) in the Growth-Point Theory. Methodologically, we used the Metaphor Identification Guidelines for Gestures (MIG-G), developed by Cienki (2017) and adapted for Brazilian Portuguese data by Avelar and Cienki (2023). Our corpus consists of 2 video lessons on coordinate clauses at the high school level, originating from a database of 16 video lessons collected freely from the YouTube platform. We also used ELAN to create tiers of analysis based on the steps proposed on MIG. In the results obtained, we observed that the production of catchments (gestural networks) plays a role in structuring and giving cohesion to the teachers’ discourse, since successive verbo-gestural metaphors support the argument/concept initially proposed by them. We also verified that different teachers produce similar verbo-gestural metaphors, related to the Conduit Metaphor, when teaching the same content, resulting in the construction of similar catchments (gestural networks).