Natural disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia and gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand

This paper examines onomatopoeia and gesture in the description of earthquakes, to better understand how people produce complex multimodal representations of experiences. We use narratives from New Zealand English speakers (2010/2011 earthquakes around Christchurch), and from Nubri and Syuba (Tibeto-Burman) speakers (2015 earthquakes in Nepal). We selected 16 narratives from each event. Between the two datasets there were distinct preferences regarding onomatopoeia; no English speakers used onomatopoeia, while seven participants across the Nepal narratives did, using distinct onomatopoeic tokens, which conformed to similar phonetic shapes. Speakers across all groups used gesture to iconically represent the earthquake, with similarities across groups regarding a preference for two hands and repetition of movement. New Zealand participants consistently used vertical gesture trajectory, while the Nepali participants used horizontal-trajectory gestures. We argue that this is likely a result of cultural context but also the interaction of housing types with the motion of an earthquake, and represents iconic information in the gestural channel that is not captured in the spoken channel. This paper illustrates the importance of considering the multimodal iconic representation of events in narrative to build an understanding of the sensory experience of an event that is shared in the retelling.