Zdes’ vs. tut ‘here’: corporal and gestural analysis of complete synonyms

The paper describes the differences between two Russian pronominal adverbs, zdes’ and tut ‘here’, which are full synonyms. The author analyzes the data of Russian National Corpus from the statistical and semantic points of view and concludes that zdes’ refers to some location, which is situated near to a speaker, but out of a speaker’s private zone. On the contrary, tut refers to the event, which takes place at some location, and a speaker positions him/herself as a central component of this event. The analysis of the gestural accompaniment of these pronominal adverbs, which has been carried out on the data of the Multimodal Russian Corpus, shows that zdes’ is regularly accompanied with index finger pointing, while tut prefers pointing with open hand. The reason of this gestural distribution relates to the inner form of the correspondent gestures.