The article explores correlations between motion verbs and head and hands gestures using the RUPEX corpus. The verbs are divided into four groups based on their meanings. Мonological and dialogical parts of the recordings are compared along with the speaker’s role and viewpoint in gestures. The pilot analysis of motion verbs in the multimodal corpus showed that the relationships between verb type, non-verbal behavior and speaker’s role depend on a complex set of factors and manifests itself in different ways in different channels. In the verbal channel no direct relationship between the semantic type of the verb and the speaker’s role was detected; however, the narrators and commentators who have seen the film used more affectional vocabulary than the reteller while the latter tended to use more vector-prefixed verbs. In manual channel рrefixes or their absence do not influence the use of hand gestures. Transitive verbs meaning manipulations of different items are more probable to be illustrated by depictive gestures. Predictably, motion verbs in the strict sense are more prone to be supported by observer viewpoint (O-VPT) gestures, while verbs of manipulation are usually used with C-VPT gestures. In cephalic channel motion verbs in the strict sense (relocation of a character) are usually illustrated by O-VPT depictive gestures, and manipulation verbs are more probably supported by pantomime C-VPT gestures similar to manual channel. In some head gestures the viewpoint is combined. If the verb is repeated by the same or another speaker the gestures differ in both manual and cephalic channels. Cephalic gesture clusters on motion verbs have mostly a depictive function, which may be considered a gestural illustration.

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The article deals with the diachronic path of Russian pronoun expansion, which affected the period of the 11th–17th centuries: paki li Øpro soromit Øpro sebe svobodna > jesli on osramit — ona svobodna ‘if he rapes [the slave], she is freed’ (the treaty of 1191–1192 between Novgorod, Gotland, and the German Cities, and its modern translation). The initial trigger of this phenomenon is often attributed to the realm of the third person since the third-person auxiliary was lost first and the third-person subject pronoun massively expanded earlier than the first- and second-person subject pronouns. Nevertheless, one cannot argue that the latter was caused by the former, since the new subject pronouns did not only replace the old auxiliary forms but were also detected in finite verbal clauses where no auxiliaries were ever used. To explore what exactly caused the expansion of pronouns and how this expansion took place in different types of clauses, a diachronic analysis of finite clauses with reduced subject reference was conducted, with a special focus on the type of the predicate. Within the analysis, the referential data of three different Old Russian registers—informal, official and literary—were examined and compared to each other. The results support the hypothesis of copula drop as a trigger for the expansion of pronouns and demonstrate that several intermediate stages of this process can be detected in official and literary texts, where the course of evolution was slower. Thus, only official texts allow us to discover the earlier stage of new referential pronouns substituting former verbal copulas, and only in literary works can we find the transitional elliptical pattern without pronouns or copulas, which existed before the new pronominal pattern.

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The article addresses the relation of referential expressions and co-occurring kinetic phenomena (hand and head gestures) on the material of the RUPEX multimodal corpus. The results reflect significant differences in how individual movements and gestures are aligned with two major types of reference (full NPs vs. reduced expressions). It was initially assumed that full NPs are more often accompanied by a gesture. Our data support this hypothesis not only through the material of hand gestures, but also through head movements. Moreover, full NPs are more likely to be accompanied by downward movements in both manual and cephalic channels, as well as by metadiscourse gestures, in comparison to reduced referential units (personal and demonstrative pronouns). In addition, pronouns are more likely to be aligned with pointing hand gestures and zero reference is often accompanied by descriptive hand gestures. However, the kinetic behavior of the interlocutors is determined by a variety of factors, including the topic of the conversation, which predisposes to certain types of gestures and the relative position of the interlocutors.