Catchment Analysis of the Deictic Gestures in Al. Ibadi's Political News Conference: A Multimodal CDA Study

catchment, growth point, context model, polarization

Abstract

The present study sheds light on the correlation between deictic gestures and their synchronized speech and the construction of thematically biased catchments. Discourse, in this respect, is manipulated through linguistic and gestural encodings that can indicate underlying ideologies. The ideological polarization between in-groups and out-groups is the end focus of the multimodal analysis of Al. Ibadi's  political speech. Thus, a multimodal (audio-visual) CDA of the political speech in question is held to explore the catchment analysis that embody ideological implications. Al-Ibadi's talk tackles the contention with the Saudi Arabia about the support of the ISIS; the study blends van Dijk's (2008) framework of political discourse analysis and McNeill's (2005) Growth Point theory which takes the catchment analysis of gestures as the basis for examining the correlation between gestures and their synchronized speech. The present study affirms that the expression of deictic gestures is complementary to speech and part of the propositional content of utterances, and exhibits an image schema to help addressees to determine location or direction of the motion of social actors in a presumptive orientation.