

Kathryn Barnes
(Associate Member)
Goethe University Frankfurt
barnes@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Kathryn Barnes is a doctoral researcher in formal semantics at Goethe University. She completed her BA in French and German Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016 and her MA in Linguistics at The University of Manchester in 2019, where her thesis was based on fieldwork on the semantics of modal verbs in Malay. Her research has since turned to iconicity, with a particular focus on ideophones, including experimentally investigating the meaning and at-issue status of ideophones crosslinguistically, as well as developing a semantic account for the phenomena. She is also interested in exploring how ideophones interact with other iconic enrichments such as gestures and understanding ideophone-like constructions in other modalities, for example classifier constructions and idiomatic signs in sign language.
Selected publications
- Barnes, K. R., Ebert, C., Hörnig, R., & Stender, T. (2022). The at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5827


Marion Bonnet
(Associate Member, PhD Candidate)
University of Göttingen
marion.bonnet@uni-goettingen.de
Marion Bonnet graduated in 2021 from the University of Paris, France, where she received her Bachelor and Master in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics. Since September 2021, she is affiliated with Göttingen University and works as a PhD student for the IDEAlISM project (collaboration of UCL, Frankfurt and Göttingen University). Her research focuses mainly on pointing gestures and their interaction with speech at the semantic-pragmatic interface, aiming at a more complete understanding of multimodal communication and a potential enrichment of linguistic models. She proposes to investigate this topic by adopting an experimental approach fed by sign language, semantic and pragmatic theories.
Selected publications
- Bonnet, M., Donati, C., & Geraci, C. (2022). Evidence for early lexical integration of speech and gestures. In NELS 52: Proceedings of the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (Vol. 1, pp. 81-94).
- Schlenker, P., Bonnet, M., Lamberton, J., Lamberton, J., Chemla, E., Santoro, M., & Geraci, C. (2022). Iconic Syntax: Sign Language Classifier Predicates and Gesture Sequences. Linguistics and Philosophy.


Jana Bressem
(Associate Member)
TU Chemnitz
jana.bressem@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Jana Bressem is Post-Doc at the chair for German Linguistics, Semiotics and Multimodal Communication at the TU Chemnitz. She is the head of the center „Gesture Studies and Speech Sciences“, executive board member and project leader in the CRC 1410 “Hybrid Societies” in a project on “Intentionality and joint attention in multimodal interaction”. Jana Bressem received her PhD at the European University Viadrina in 2012 where she has also worked in various (interdisciplinary) research projects. She is interested in the multimodality of language (speech/gesture, text/image), typological gesture studies, language and cognition, pragmatics, and human-machine interaction.
Selected publications
- Bressem, J. (2015). Repetition als Mittel der Musterbildung bei redebegleitenden Gesten. In C. Dürscheid & J.G. Schneider (eds.), Satz, Äußerung, Schema (pp. 422-442). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
- Bressem, Jana (2021). Repetitions in gesture: A cognitive-linguistic and usage based perspective. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter: Mouton. Bressem, J., & Ladewig, S. H. (2011). Rethinking gesture phases: Articulatory features of gestural movement? Semiotica, 184(1/4), 53–91. doi:10.1515/semi.2011.022
- Bressem, J., Ladewig, S. H., & Müller, C. (2013). Linguistic annotation system for gestures (LASG). In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (eds.), Body-Language-Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.1.) (pp. 1098-1125). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Bressem, J., Stein, N., & Wegener, C. (2017). Multimodal language use in Savosavo: Refusing, excluding and negating with speech and gesture. Pragmatics, 27(2),173-206. doi:10.1075/prag.27.2.01bre
- Harrison, Simon, Silva H. Ladewig & Jana Bressem (eds.) (2021). The diversity of recurrency: Recurrent gesture cross-linguistically, Gesture 20:2 (Special Issue).


Pia Gehlbach
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
pia.gehlbach@uni-goettingen.de
Pia Gehlbach works on iconicity and semantic conceptualization in sign language with a focus on German Sign Language. She holds a B.A. in English Philology and General Linguistics and a M.A. in English with a linguistic focus, both from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen where she now works as a member of the Sign Language Lab at the Department of German Philology. She is a member of the RTG 2070 Understanding Social Relationships. In her PhD project, she investigates the influence of sign language iconicity on the semantic conceptualization of various types of concepts, combining corpus-data analysis with an experimental approach. Her project aims at providing a systematic overview of the iconicity of the investigated signs, as well as to examine if, and how, this iconicity has an impact on the way in which a concept is semantically conceptualized.


Marianthi Koraka
(Associate Member)
University of Göttingen
marianthi.koraka@uni-goettingen.de
Marianthi works on sign languages and holds a special interest in the aspect of modality effects. She completed her BA and MA studies at the University of Ioannina, Greece and in her MA thesis she explored word order in GSL in simple declarative sentences and in wh-questions. In her PhD project, she investigates imperative speech acts in Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS) by using elicitation and judgement tasks. Through her project she aims to discover which strategies -morphosyntactic and prosodic- are employed in sign languages for the articulation of imperative speech acts and define the contribution of particular manual and non-manual elements. One of her research goals is to find whether sign languages possess a particular sentence type for the expression of directive constructions, similar to the one we call “Imperative” in spoken languages, and how it can be defined by applying specific diagnostics.