Speaker: Professor Gaëlle Ferré, University of Poitiers, France
Abstract: “Argumentative discourse aims at influencing the opinions, attitudes or behaviours of an interlocutor or an audience by making a statement credible or acceptable” (Adam, Les textes : types et prototypes, Paris : Nathan, 1992:116). There are however different ways of reaching this goal as will be shown in a collection of varied internet videos on climate change. Ecological discourses may be of an expositive nature, i.e. rely on explanations of processes, but can also be closer to exhortation as environmentalists wish to urge people and governments to act on the issue of global warming. A difference in multimodal complexity and/or intensity is observed between the two genres, which are expressed through various multimodal constructs involving gesture, object handling and use of diverse visual resources, but also different verbal strategies and prosodic variations (in terms of intonation, stress, rhythm, etc).
Bio: Gaëlle Ferré is a professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Poitiers in France. She works mainly in Multimodal Discourse Analysis on audiovisual documents of various genres, with a focus on gesture, prosody and the semantic/syntax interface in Discourse Analysis. The focus of her research consists in showing how communication involves speakers to choose among the different semiotic modes at their disposal to convey linguistic content in the most efficient way, and how hearers attend to these semiotic modes. In oral communication, the semiotic modes available to convey messages are not limited to verbal content but also include prosodic variations and bodily behaviour and all of these together form gestalts that are both internally complex and compositional.
so hello everybody I would really like to thank Anna for inviting me today and Andrew for his help with a setting up of a computer and it is a real pleasure to present my work in multimodel discourse analysis I have worked in this area of research for more than 20 years now and I’m glad to see that the field has grown considerably in recent years so my talk today will focus on language variations in ecological discourses on global warming and I’ll show what strategies adopted by scientists and activists to make their discourse more convincing this is work in progress so I would be very happy to get your feedback on possible improvements here is an overview of my presentation after a short introduction I’ll present a literature review of sens with a particular focus on gesture and POS which are two main uh semiotic mes I have been concentrating on in my research and I think that some of you may need this background to understand what follows uh when we describe a genre in discourse analysis what we do is that we consider the Salient features of the text we examine and we see in this presentation that the two discourse types I describe feature different types of prominence after the short literature review I will describe the expository dimension of discourses on ecology and I will contrast them with exhortative discourses which are also very much present under the pressure of Rapid climate change and I will then conclude my presentation a large part of face Toof face communication is based on what enfields uh Enfield sorry calls multimodel embl or constructs where information is distributed in different modalities that interact and combine to form GS that are both internally complex and compositional the semantic and pragmatic content in our communication is conveyed by the verbal modality thanks to the words used and the syntactic arrangements chosen by speakers as well as by the overal modality as speakers deliver um their messages adopting a particular phonetic production and proy the visual modality is also important since gestures and facial expressions play an essential role in communication but speakers may also rely on images or any kind of visual content that might be provided in the verbal scene by the participants speakers communicate the various pieces of information in their messages by selecting the modality best suited to the content conveyed and by articulating the different modalities with each other the different Arrangements of the modalities Evolve within a single discourse in the framework of multimodal discourse analysis the term interactions has acquired several understandings it is not only used as a term for some kind of dialogue between individuals but it may also refer to the way the semiotic mes evoked in the previous slide interact in order to elaborate linguistic messages and convey different meanings interactions take place in a physical space and social context which may become more or less Salient at any time throughout this course as do all of the modalities involved in the elaboration of the linguistic message this means that elements of context and semiotic modes involved in communication evolve constantly throughout any interaction and some modality may become more Salient at any point in discourse and change the way discourse is perceived by an audience this is what secet noris calls model density model density can be achieved through model intensity or model complexity or both and we will see illustrations of that later in the talk model intensity increases with the increase of the intensity or weight of a mood for instance a larger pitch movement or a larger gesture increases the modle intensity at this particular point in time modal complexity has to do with how intricate the different mes are at different times there are times when only speech is in focus and other utterances that involve gestures object handling video projection on background screen emphatic pro pro and so on obviously these passages are much more complex than just speech as a result utterances which are both more intense and more complex show a higher model density than utterances which are less intense and that involve only one or two semiotic mes we will see that this is relevant when analyzing political discourses on global warming So based on varied video clips collected from YouTube my talk today will focus on the fact that discourses on global warming are based on two different textual genes Exposition and exhortation whereas the aim of expository discourse is to explain expl the nature and reasons of climate change exaltation aims at encouraging people to act this speech style is not necessarily richer in terms of model complexity but is certainly sharper in terms of model intensity we can therefore say that in between the two Jes there is a shift from higher model complexity to higher model intensity and we will see how the difference between the two types of discourse is is expressed in terms of multimodality keep in mind however that what I’m presenting today is a new development of my previous work and will be limited to a qualitative analysis since a quantitative analysis would require a lot more annotation work to allow a statistical treatment of the data before presenting my analysis of the two discour genes I will now give you some background on how gestures Pro and speech elements can participate in the perception of linguistic salience which is directly involved in the way discourse can be perceived as more expositive or exhortative my analysis of video documents has led me to consider the different levels of salience in each video this concept has been defined by lraa as referring above all to the emergence of a figure on a grind that is the highlighting of an element in a message in linguistics this emergence is due to prestic lexical syntactic or semantic mechanisms and its main consequence is the highlighting of an entity or part of the message which is thus favored over the ground the rest of the message and its context during the comprehension process to this definition one can add that gestures also contribute to the perception of part of the message as more Salient than the rest the first thing to be noted concerning gestures is that their mere presence supposes that the speaker has selected and highlighted some elements in speech however there are different ways to do so the physical features selected by co-verbal gestures acquire a certain prominence due to the schematic nature of the gestures made by speakers as mberg explains she says so while physical in nature gestures often emerge as rather schematic Garts that as such have the capacity to vividly convey essential semantic and pragmatic aspects of high relevance to the speaker as a way of highlighting certain features of objects or more abstract Notions people can perform representational or nonre representational gestures here are different gesture types following the descriptions of David mcneel and Adam Kendon the founders of the field of gesture studies there are three different types of representational gestures iconic gestures Give A visual representation of some object or action for instance if you form a ball with her hands to illustrate a round object metaphoric gestures represented an abstract concept as when for instance you depict a scale with both hands to illustrate the notion of Justice when gestures have become conventionalized to the point that they are understandable without speech they form the category of emblems one illustration of this is the okay suum up gesture sorry speech is also uh regularly accompanied with not representational gestures which were also called pragmatic gestures by Adam Kendon these gestures don’t represent aspects of reference contrary to the ones on the left of the slide some of these nonrepresentational gestures highlight the structure of discourse or speech turns this is Thea case of flips of a hands at the beginning of discourse units to introduce a new point but also hands closed into a fist of are coming in contact at the end of this cion some gestures like the Palm up open hand gesture or pure gesture described by cornelian Miller may serve the expression of stance in an utterance and by this I mean the way speakers position themselves both towards the audience and towards the content of their discourse other non-representational gestures are more directly linked with expression of sence this is the case of Beats these gestures regularly accompany prolic emphasis although it has been shown that they may Express emphasis themselves without any prootic sence pointing gestures have been shown by adelene and clink andberg to be linked to the expression of emphasis as well but whereas beats serve to highlight some part of speech points highlight some parts uh some part of space or some concrete reference in that space I have shown in a paper that will hopefully come out soon that bits and points share quite a certain number of features one of these being that they can be added to another gesture so one gesture may have several Dimensions as stated by David mcneel for instance you may Point towards somebody with the Palm hop open and gesture shape which gives gives the pointing gesture a Nuance of offering the speech or offering the speech turn which is not present if the point is performed with the index finger beyond the production of gesture type gesture size of course participates as well in the perception of sans a large gesture is generally perceived as much more Salient than a smaller version of the same gesture I have shown in a previous study that large hand gestures may even induce the perception of prootic sence when there is in fact absolutely no emphatic stress in speech speakers may also use other bodily movements to emphasize speech they may raise their Braes as a way to indicate special emphasis on a word they may also adopt certain facial expressions to emphasize modality in speech for instance they can also perform headshakes and nods as way to emphasize discourse items emphasis may also be present in speech under the form of spe specific presic constructs the largest part of our linguistic messages is outed in what is understood as BR focus in BR Focus the whole utterance is considered as relevant in the activation state of listeners bir focus is generally marked in statements by a regularly decreasing pitch intensity a final falling tone and the last Sy of the utterance is usually longer too this is the type of focus that we have in the following utterance Illustrated in this part screenshot the speech analysis software that I use in my research we hear about it causing climate change we hear about it causing climate change this Ence is composed of a single inter phrase and the last lexical item in the utterance carries the nuclear Accent on the first syllable of the compound word climate change and this stress is perceived as the most important one in the phrase it corresponds to the part highlighted in pink in the figure it start slightly higher in Pitch than the preceding stress on the First of coing and the pitch movement is slightly larger you otherwise see that both pitch and intensity decrease regularly throughout the utterance this is the default intonation contour for statements and it means that the whole utterance is considered as relevant in the meaning making of the speaker on the contrary in narrow Focus only part of the linguistic message is considered as relevant in the activation state of listeners there is some emphasis on this particular part of speech which is characterized by some earlier boundary tone higher intensity and pitch and the syllables on Focus are generally lengthened especially their handsets this type of focus can be contrastive or just emphatic although some scaries consider emphasis as some form of implicit contrast here is an example of narrow figus but the truth is more nuanced than that but the truth is more nuanced than that in this example the speaker emphasizes the word truth as highlighted on the pat screenshot this word is perceived as most or as more Salient than the rest of the intonation phrase the default pattern in B Focus would have assigned the nuclear accent to the first syllable of the word nuanced which is the last lexical element in the phrase but this is not the case here as some extra prominence has been assigned to the truth that is going to be delivered by the speaker here we’ve seen an example of prominence achieved by higher pitch higher intensity and longer soluable duration but there are other possible means of emphasizing some part of speech speech rate and Tempo may also be involved as we will see later in the talk salience as we have seen can be present in gesture and POS but it can also be present in speech itself there are many different ways speakers can achieve emphasis in speech but the most studied ones are syntactic semantic and discursive in syntax LR distinguishes different sentence forms that can be used in the expression of focus among these forms we count dislocation and topicalization which may be used to introduce or reintroduce some verbal reference cleft and pseudocleft sentences that are used to select a reference in a set of options and presentative constructions these are syntactic structures which are present or introduce uh sorry which present or introduce an entity bringing it to the attention of the address e emphasis can also be conveyed in speech with the use of scaler adverbs like extremely or modifi is like most but also at the interface between semantics and syntax when one changes a word or rephrases a sentence especially when this is not linked to hesitation phenomena some discourse trips like hyperbole or metaphor will also convey some emphasis one point that is important is that sence may be expressed in speech in Pro or in gesture but it may also be expressed in a multimodal way although this is not necessary and most of the time not the preferred option in ordinary conversation as I showed in a paper published in speech communication this means that when sence is expressed in several semiotic moods at the same time for instance sence expressed in speech in Pro and in gesture uh then the model density this speech part is very high I am now going to describe the expository discourse on ecology that used to be frequent when people began to be concerned with global warming and they had to explain why it is important that we take action soon expository discourse can be described as a subj of pedagogical discourse I say subj because pedagogical discourse of course includes explanations but it’s far from limited to this activity expository discourse is used to explain describe or give information Exposition is a discourse encountered in textbooks classroom lectures technical papers or documentaries with this form of discourse the speaker assumes that the listener has no or little prior knowledge or prior understanding of a topic that is being discussed because this course on on global warming in those scientific processes it is natural that people who want to warn nations against the effects of global warming have recourse to this jaw which I find very often in my Corpus resorting to scientific explanation gives more credibility to the diverse Calles to action it includes the use of numerous examples and explanations of processes and systems this type of discourse was described by nipples as including more low frequency words or rare words and more complex syntactic structures than other discourse types this explains why I find sequences in which speakes rename and Define products or concepts quite often in the genre I also find that expository discourse is close pres odically speaking to pedagogical discourse and is frequently Ed with greater emphasis on the beginning rather than at the end of accentual phrases in contrast to the presic pattern of spontaneous speech for example multimod this discour frequently relies on visual resources like slideshows maps and so on and speakers regularly perform mediated actions in mediated action a speaker may use a smaller scale model model to illustrate this point for instance as far as skill verbal gestures are concerned this discour includes three types of gestures in particular discourse organization gestures pointing to the visual support where appropriate and iconic representational gestures which illustrate the verbal content in speech and may even complement other types of visuals to illustrate the characteristics of expository discourse mentioned in the previous slide here is an example of a TED Talk presentation on global warming it’s not an exaggeration to say that a threat to the ozone layer is a threat to human safety and actually ironically it was human safety that motivated the invention of CFCs in the first place you see in the early days of refrigeration refrigerators use toxic inflammable chemicals like propane and I so in this example you see that the sentences used are complex ones but the particular feature to be noticed here is a constant use of technical vocabulary with words like words like ozone layer propane or ammonia to create just a few items there are also acronyms in this discour like CFCs in this example the use of tech technical vocabulary that was Illustrated in the previous example of the same speaker leads to numerous renaming and rephrasing processes as is the case here with the acronym CFC and third CFCs chlorofluorocarbons man-made chemicals that were used as propellent in aerosol spray cans the acon is first rephrased with the technical term chloro carbin and is then given a more accessible definition with man-made chemicals that was used as propellent in AOL spray cans you note that the technical term chloro floc carbons doeses not had any easy to understand explanation to a lay audience it however gives the speakers talk a more scientific Dimension as I said earlier exposit discourse is also frequently associated with what are called mediated actions this is the case when discourses are based on some kind of artifact used by the speaker as is the case of the video on top of a slide in which the speaker makes a short experiment to explain why the level of otions has risen the experiment consist in heat heating water to see how its level rises in in a test tube as we warm this water it expands here the speaker also makes an iconic gesture to accompany the expansion of the water mentioned in speech he projects his hand forward in an opening movement to physically represent the expansion there is also an artifact used in a second video on the slide my fear is not that Earth will fall over a cliff on the 1st of January 2030 my fear is that we press Unstoppable buttons in the Earth’s system in this video the visual um the visual material sorry is different from the usual visual support that is used most of the time in presentations here the visual support is used as if it were a concrete 3D artifact in a sort of pretend action made by the speaker of pushing re over a cliff you also makes another iconic gesture as he performs the action of pressing an imaginary button which also seems to exert an action on the video on the screen behind him here is another video where the artifact is an earth glob which is used by the speaker to explain ocean currents let’s have a look at this the ocean Works in a similar way in the Atlantic you have the Gulf Stream going up the coast of North America it gets colder as it gets closer to the poles colder air is denser it gets saltier as some of that water on the surface freezes and that also makes it denser and that denser water sinks down into the depths of the ocean and then goes along the ocean floor back towards the equ see speakers uh rely quite a lot on either an object used as an artifact or on some visual support there are quite a lot of pointing gestures towards these visual support as shown by Harrison these points are essential to the construction of meaning in TCH talk conferences and these certainly applies to other types of presentations in which the same expository goal is present some of the points in this video are static when others are more Dynamic which means that some points actually refer to a particular space location whereas other points Trace lines to follow different space directions at the end of the video the speaker also performs some iconic gesture to represent the movement of denser water in the depth of the ocean so in the clipse the artifact is not conceived of as offering a standalone representation of the concepts explained what is shown with the use of the artifact is also represented in a somewhat more symbolic way with gesture performance without the AR artifact we are very close to pedagogical classroom discourse in these videos in expository discourse speakers also perform frequent hand flips we have two examples of this hand gesture in these two uh exerts it gets colder as it gets closer to the poles colder air is denser in this example the hand flip signals some justification for adding the fact that whereas the speaker was describing water dens water density is now mentioning colder hair verus explaining how the Gulf Stream underwater affects air masses above ocean level the hand flip is slightly skewed because of a presence of the globe but its prototypical form is generally more horizontal alen has described several forms of a hand flip some of which are more reduced versions than others one of these multifunctional gestures rules is to emphasize a new point in discourse this addition is also expressed in speech in the second example on this slide with the use of Oru it gets saltier as some of that water on the surface freezes and that also makes it denser and that let’s have a look now at the prolic shape of aanes Ed together with gestures in this video clip quantities expressed with two iconic gestures that emphasize the words enormous and little bit so you get this enormous ocean just a little bit warmer in terms of pro enormous and little are lengthened and pronounced with Rising falling intonation Contours as you can see on this screenshot from Pratt the two length and speech parts and variation in Pitch Contour participate in emphas sizing the two words which become more Salient than the rest of the utterance enormous ocean just a little bit warmer now that we’ve seen examples of the exposit reion we will see some discourses on global warming have a more exhortative Dimension exhortative discourse or exhortation is defined by black as a genre of discourse in which the evocation of an emotional response in the audience induces belief in the situation to which the emotion is appropriate it is a subj all of persuasive argumentative discourse it is found most frequently in sermons as well as in activist discourse and it aims at urging recipients to act or at justifying cses of action in the material I’ve been looking at I find that exhortation is expressed in speech content by more frequent recourse to hyperbolic speech and contrast but also of metaphoric Language by speakers sentences are generally shorter than what we find in expository discourse and used in paratactic style which means that closes are just opposed without an expression of conjunctions the use of models must and can is much more pervasive than other models like should or could I also find that beat Pro is more frequent in this type of discourse in which all the words may carry some emphasis prootic beats are regularly accompanied by beat gestures while contrasting viewpoints can be expressed in hand gestures being performed in different parts of a speaker’s personal space we’ve seen previously that in the of expository discourse speakers may use mediated actions like using small scale experiment resources to convey the meaning of the explanation and establish parallels between this smaller version and events in the real world in the case of exhortative discourse however speakers perform more symbolic direct actions this slide shows a series of screen catches from YouTube which reveal several hyperbolic and metaphoric images that have been going around on the net about global warming while some videos simply describe extreme weather others go further referring to the apocalypse and announcing the death of H by 20130 as the ice of the Arctic is melting faster than was first expected the planet is metaphorically uh represented as a giant I ice cream cone and global warming is considered as a ticking Time Bomb after years of what we should do to reduce global warming or what we could do to improve life conditions the new Moto of the ecological debate has changed to what we can or must do in face of the numerous threats these M auxiliaries have been used more and more often in political discourse concerning global warming metaphor is not only present in speech it may also have some representation in gesture as in this example although this is not very frequent the amount of carbon that goes into the carbon cycle comes back out again it’s all a closed loop I play this one again the amount of carbon that goes into the carbon cycle comes back out again it’s all a closed loop here the speaker illustrates the carbon cycle with two metaphoric GES in a vertical plane as he first makes two circular gestures that both represent the abstract concept of a cycle based on the common graphic representation of a cycle Loop uh with circular arrows he finishes with another circular gesture performed in the horizontal plane to illustrate a loop the first two gestures also accompany speech ated at a very fast speech rate compared with the rest of his talk and without any p this also contributes to the metaphoric representation of a loop and is evocative of fast trains in M CS hyperbole is considered in the literature as an exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally and which is generally not considered as a lie the use of the word bludgeon in the example on this slide has a metaphoric meaning as it Compares our argumentation to some kind of fight in which an argument can be used as a weapon yet the mention of the term bludgeon which is quite a low frequency word as well as the gesture performed by the speaker acquires some hyperbolic Dimension so we’re going to use climate change as this bludgeon for economic redistribution okay in the second example from the same talk show another speaker is mimicking mimicking the extreme positions adopted by supporters of both theories concerning climate change and he does this in quite a hyperbolic way it’s not like it’s right or wrong or it’s a binary choice where it’s do nothing nothing to see here don’t do anything versus stop everything you’re doing this is the number one issue we’re all going to die there has to be some Nuance here as he opposes extreme scaler quantifiers like nothing everything and all he also performs large gestures supposed to report some enactments by Believers of both sides of the theory the size of the gestures which is also Amplified both by the contrasting spaces where they are performed in front of a speaker’s body as well as by louder speech participate in the impression of exaggeration the type of contrast we’ve just seen in the previous slide is frequently established by speakers in their speech to strengthen their argumentation the expression of contrast doesn’t mean that the arguments presented by speakers are antithetical as was the case previously they can also reveal an additional nature this is the case in the example on this slide where the speaker opposes every company’s business model to every country’s nationally determined contribution but we need more because there is a lot of warming that we can prevent if we quickly deploy the full set of affordable and available strategies we need Standalone methane targets as part of every company’s business model and every country’s nationally determined contribution as the Paris agreement is strengthened you see that this contrast is achieved with two presentational gestures uh in opposite directions one being performed on the left of a speaker and the other on our right these two directions represent two levels of action a local one and a more National level each level of action being incomplete without the other in this other example the same speaker proposes two series of contrasting presentational gestures the first one Associates communities and ecosystems and therefore establishes a parallel between the needs of human beings and the needs of nature the second one establishes a contrast between two opposite natural elements Fire and Water this would help communities and ecosystems adapt to a changing climate and hit the brakes on worsening Extreme events like wildfires in the Americas in Australia and flooding in Europe and Asia you notice that the last two gestures opposing wide fires and flooding are much more ample than the first two gestures she performed and are therefore more Salient be gestes are particularly pervasive in argumentative discourse and extremely frequent in political discourses they participate in the rmic structure of utterances as is the case in this example this number could increase to 120 to nearly 200 gigatons of avoided greenhouse gases so the speaker here makes a first pointing gesture towards the screen on his left and while holding this gesture he also performs a series of Beats on the stressed soles of his speech you see the aine screenshot where the gestures have been CED but in this very short extract there is only one be during the first first intonation phrase this number could increase but the following intonation phrases are accompanied by two to three beats in superposition with a pointing gesture which means that gesture density is much higher on these utterances than on the first some of the Beats represented here are also quite small but others are much larger like the beat performed in synchrony was avoided numerous and larger beats have an effect on how intense speech is perceived however the strengthening effect of Beats is perceived as even more effective when beat gestures accompany speech pronounced with what is called beat POS here is an example on this slide of beat Pro there is only one option I repeat to you only one option left to climatologists and scientists and that is to do the UN thinkable what you see in this video is a speaker who performs a certain number of beat gestures as he speaks most of them with his hands but he also performs a beat with his head at the end of the clip at some point his speech is also divided into shorter intonation phrases than what we would normally expect as shown in his part screenshot only one option left to climatologists and scientists the features of beat POS is that there are frequent PES between short intonation phrases you also see that pitch in blue and intensity in green are equally high on all the stressed soles of the rhythmic groups except in the last one and scientists this is normally not the case in ordinary speech in which pitch and intensity decrease progressively throughout what can be considered as an noral paragraph here is another example of beat Pro in a speech by alore in the US note how the passages of beat Pro are accompanied by beat gestures when the speaker is visible on the screen every piece of proclimate legislation the oil and gas industry and the coal industry they come in and fight it tooth and nail and they use their legacy network of political influence and wealth to stop progress the rest of us have to reform these International institutions so that the people of this world can say we are now in charge of our own destiny we’re going to save the future and give people hope we can do it and remember that political will is itself a renewable resource as you can see on the pr screenshot below the video alore splits his utterance into small interation phrases three of which are iic in structure IMS are metric feet that consist of a weak CLE and a stressed one which is here strongly accented we are now in charge of our own destiny each it of a speaker is Ed on a flat tone with very little difference in Pitch between stressed and unstressed sols which are also pronounced quite loudly in each it the last syllable is also much longer than the first this two beat rythmic pattern uh present both in speech and in the accompanying be gestes gives the speech a chunting nature which makes it more convincing and participate in the feeling of exhortation B pro is also present in the last V video I would like to show you here the young lady also adopts some form of beat POS with more accented syllables than would normally be found in ordinary speech we cannot afford new oil and gas the accented syllables are pronounced with high pitch and flat tones apart from the two following tones visible in the pr screenshot on canot and gas which are located at the beginning and the end of the utterance we cannot afford new oil and gas these strong prolic beads are accompanied by beads of the Torso of a young lady who’s holding a can of tomato soup this video has also shocked some people in the world as the Declaration is immediately followed by direct action when the young lady throws the soup on some artwork this type of action is of course not new in activism and we can think of a new numerous actions taken by Green Peace and other such organizations but it seems to me that we have recently uh witnessed a renewed interest in mediatic actions concerning global warming I will now briefly conclude this presentation what I hope to have shown today is that global warming has been the subject of two completely different discourse types the first type of discourse is expository nature its structure is complex in the verbal semiotic mode with complex sentences and use of less frequent lexical words speakers also emphasize the important elements in speech and accompany their descriptions with mediated actions and representational gestures besides points and beats in the exhortative genre we’ve seen that speakers frequently use metaphors and hyperbole in speech and sometimes in gesture as well although their sentences are less elaborate syntactically and lexically speaking their intonation is however more marked with chanting prootic patterns and use of be Pro as a parallel to what happens in speech gestures are also less varied with the use of hand flips points and beats mainly and less representational gestures beads especially are much more frequent and can even be performed with other body parts like head or torso actions are not mediated ones but real symbolic actions in the environment this means that both discourses are equally dense in a multimodal perspective because they are conveyed through different semiotic modes like gesture visual resources and object handling as well as proy yet there has been a shift from a more complex discourse in the expository genre to a more intense discourse in the exhortative genre with more emphatic speech as well as posic patterns gestures and actions what we have seen together in this presentation are simply two different ways to convince people that some action is required facing the urgency of global warming I thank you for your attention and would be very happy to answer any question