Verbal and gestural representations of the everyday notion of happiness in the oral narrative of American students

This article deals with verbal and gestural representations of the everyday notion of happiness in the oral narrative of American university students. Verbal and gestural representations are comprised by another term, namely multimodal representation. Happiness as a phenomenon can be conceptualized at different levels (or to different degrees) of abstraction. This article is devoted to the lowest degree of abstraction, i.e. the everyday notion of happiness, represented multimodally. Major characteristics of verbal and gestural representations of objective (sources of happiness) and subjective (evaluation and emotion) components of the narrative under consideration were identified by means of gesture analysis and content analysis. A few key metaphors were identified. In the article we emphasize that identification of these metaphors could have been impossible if we had studied monomodal representation only.