Researchers involved: Anastasia Bauer (GeSi, University of Cologne) and Silva Ladewig (StabiGest, University of Göttingen)
Both researchers of spoken and signed languages have started to investigate conventionalization processes in manual and non-manual movements. Scholars of co-speech gestures started to put special emphasis on the analysis of recurrent gestures. These manual movements are conventionalized to some degree as they show a stable form meaning relationship (Bressem & Müller, 2014; Ladewig, 2010, 2014). They may form culturally-shared repertoires (Bressem & Müller, 2014) and often engage in pragmatic meaning making. Some recurrent gestures appear to be shared among different speech communities. Examples are the Palm up open hand (e.g., Müller 2004; Cooperrider et al. 2018), negation gestures (e.g., Harrison 2018) or the Ring gesture (e.g., Kendon 2014). Preliminary studies suggest that recurrent gestures are also used by signers with similar meanings that may develop into lexical morphemes or discourse markers (Pfau & Steinbach, 2006, Cooperrider et al. 2018).
But are recurrent non-manual movement also shared amongst spoken and signed language communities? This is where our collaborative project ties in. By focusing on interactional data from spoken and signed language corpora we will conduct a collaborative study of one non-manual recurrent movement and compare it cross-modally in German spoken langauge and DGS. We will concentrate on head nods, the most commonly produced bodily signals in interaction.
The overall aims of the meeting are to get to know research data, share annotation methods, discuss the state of the art of current analyses, identify empirical overlaps for a collaborative study, determine a subject of collaborative analysis, prepare a joint presentation at the Gespin conference and plan a joint publication.