This study investigates the relationships between a group of English constructions that exhibit similar formal and semantic properties and their accompanying gestures. The target constructions, collectively referred to as the [ADV and ADV] constructions, are divided into two types: the reduplicative adverbial constructions (RACs; over and over, again and again, on and on) and the oppositive adverbial constructions (OACs; back and forth, up and down, in and out). Using a statistical method called crossmodal collostructional analysis, the degree of associations between these constructions and their frequent gestural correlates is quantified to explore whether they are likely to form multimodal constructions. Consequently, it is concluded that some combinations of a target construction and its corresponding gesture are associated strongly enough to be regarded as potential multimodal constructions, whereas others are more like crossmodal collostructions, which are associated combinations of linguistic and gestural constructions but are nonetheless compositional. Finally, the embodied motivations for the potential multimodal constructions are also discussed by drawing on the notion of exbodiment.

The following article reports on a multimodal corpus study of English as if constructions. The results of this study suggest that formulaic and insubordinate as if constructions are prosodically chunked as clauses, with formulaic as if constructions uttered with significantly higher pitch and insubordinate as if constructions with lower pitch when being compared with subordinate uses. In addition, insubordinate as if clauses are occasionally accompanied by frowns. It is argued that, although both constructions convey an ironic interpretation, multimodal markers of irony play only a minor role in explaining the findings. Instead, it is argued that the non-verbal features are construction-specific and can reasonably be explained as cross-modal collostructions. As such, the present article provides a description of the non-verbal features accompanying English as if clauses and provides a theoretical explanation. In doing so, some modest evidence for a multimodal Utterance Construction Grammar is also presented.