The DGfS Summer School, organised by RTG 2636 at the Georg-August University of Göttingen and the ViCom priority programme, brought together international leading experts in the fields of semantics/pragmatics, syntax/morphology and visual communication. With participants ranging from advanced undergraduates to postdocs from all over the world, the event fostered a productive and enriching environment for collaborative learning and knowledge exchange among students, researchers, and professors.
When? 12-23 August 2024
Where? University of Göttingen
Programme
Week 1
Week 2
Report
After the registration of the numerous participants and the opening words of the organisers, the Summer School started in summery Göttingen with the courses of the first week. The week was filled with a varied programme that brought together international experts.
The courses were organised in four parallel sessions. A unique aspect of the Summer School was that all ViCom courses took place in a separate, consecutive time slot, allowing participants to explore visual communication topics in depth. Here is an overview of the ViCom courses:
Sotaro Kita – Gesture, Language and Cognition
This course is an introduction to research on speech accompanying gesture. We will discuss how gesture is coordinated with language and how it contributes to thinking. The course consists of three lectures (gesture typology, self-oriented and communicative functions of gesture, and cross-cultural differences in gesture) and two practical workshops (division of labour between speech and gesture, metaphorical gestures), where you will analyze gestures in video recordings and discuss your observations with the rest of the class.
Aleksandra Ćwiek – Iconicity in Communication
This course explores iconicity in communication across various modalities. Departing from a theoretical foundation in semiotics and related fields, we will examine the manifestations of iconicity in spoken and sign languages, gestures, and prosody, as well as its impact on language acquisition, processing, and evolution. The course will address the contentious relationship between iconicity and the principle of arbitrariness in linguistic signs, challenging traditional views with evidence that supports the significant and widespread nature of iconicity in language. Participants will engage in interactive sessions and learn to empirically explore iconicity in the communication that surrounds them.
Kathryn Davidson – Sign Language Semantics / Pragmatics
Decades of research in sign language linguistics have shown that sign languages and spoken languages have the same formal, cognitive, and psycholinguistic signatures. At the same time, being part of the diverse tapestry of the world’s languages, there are also several places where sign languages provide unique insight into the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. This course will focus each day on one such example, including quantification, connectives, attitude reports, anaphora, and the nature of alternatives. Backgrounds in sign linguistics and/or formal semantics are useful but the main ideas will be accessible without either background.
Unfortunately, Kathryn Davidson had to cancel her course, but was available for meetings via Zoom.
Patrick Georg Grosz – The Semantics of Emojis
Emojis are an emerging tool of visual communication; they are a human-made artifact, which entails that their nature is shaped by human cognition and communicative needs. This course provides an introduction to the formal semantic and pragmatic analysis of emojis: several topics will be addressed, including the distinction between activity emojis and face emojis, pictorial vs. lexicalist approaches (as well as experimental ones) to emoji semantics, how to model expressive emoji meanings, and text-emoji interactions. The course will also touch on more traditional topics of linguistic inquiry, such as presuppositions, implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and formal linguistic approaches to iconicity. This course presupposes no prior knowledge of emoji meaning; however, an introductory knowledge in semantics and pragmatics is presupposed.
Jeremy Kuhn – Visible Meaning
Decades of work in formal semantics has shown that logical tools can be applied with great success to the analysis of meaning in natural languages. But human communication involves more than words and sentences; we also express meaning visibly, with depictions and gestures, showing instead of telling. In this course, we will show that the analytical tools of formal semantics can be applied productively to visible meaning as well. In week one, we will establish some basic concepts, and explore the interaction of logical meaning and iconic (visible) meaning in sign languages and gestures. In week two, we will focus on several case studies, with a particular emphasis on form-meaning mismatches in sign languages: negative concord and distributive concord.
In addition, the other sessions offered basic courses as well as courses in semantics/pragmatics, syntax/morphology, also led by leading experts in the respective disciplines (see full programme above).
In the evening, a welcome reception was held at the Historical Observatory, where lecturers and participants had the opportunity to get to know each other in a relaxed atmosphere and to kick off the first week together.
After a successful first week, the Summer School continued in summery Göttingen with an exciting and multifaceted programme. While the foundation courses were largely offered during both weeks, the second week introduced a new line-up of lecturers who brought innovative topics and perspectives to the remaining courses (see full programme above). Moreover, the ViCom block was further explored. Led by new experts, these courses introduced new topics and deepened participants’ knowledge of visual communication issues and techniques. Here is an overview of the ViCom courses offered during the second week:
Frank Kügler – The Interaction of Prosody and Gesture
Another highlight was the poster sessions, which gave participants the opportunity to present their research. These took place in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays in both weeks. The sessions provided an excellent opportunity for interaction and discussion with other participants and lecturers, as well as valuable feedback on one’s own work. It was a particular pleasure for us that there were so many student poster presentations in the field of visual communication. The book of abstracts can be found here.
Silva Ladewig – How Meaning Emerges in Gestures. A Cognitive-semiotic Approach
This course addresses the questions of how gestures convey meaning in a given context and how we can determine the significance of a gesture. To tackle these questions, we will first introduce various approaches to analyzing gestures in order to enhance our awareness of the underlying principles guiding theinvestigation and to establish a solid foundation for our analytical approach. The main part of the course will be dedicated to the study of different types of gestures. Following a cognitive-semiotic approach to gestures, we will engage in fine-grained analyses of gestures based on their form and their relation to speech, exploring the range of meanings conveyed by gestures. Additionally, methods tailored for the study of different gesture types, including spontaneous and recurrent (conventionalized) ones will be introduced.
The integration of theory and method will be a fundamental aspect of our approach, fostering a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter through hands-on application and analysis.
Roland Pfau – Sign Language Typology
Contrary to popular opinion, sign languages do not form a homogenous group. Rather, different types of sign languages can be distinguished (e.g., deaf community sign languages, rural sign languages, homesign), and within as well as across groups, sign languages differ structurally from each other at all levels of linguistic description. In this course, we will discuss selected aspects of typological variation among sign languages, and we will also compare the attested patterns to those described for some typologically diverse spoken languages. We will address aspects of the lexicon (numerals), morphosyntax (pluralization), and syntax (negation and complex sentences), and we will take a descriptive and theoretical perspective.
Our guiding questions are:
- How far do sign languages differ from each other (intra-modal comparison)?
- To what extent can typological classifications proposed based on spoken language data be applied to sign languages (cross-modal comparison)?
- Can theoretical models proposed for spoken languages be applied to sign languages?
Wim Pouw – Multimodal Signal Processing
The study of naturalistic communicative movement has reached new potential with advancements in computer vision and other computational innovations. With such advancements in for example pose estimation from 2D video, or kinematic pattern analyses for gesture understanding, old questions can be studied in new ways, but also new questions arise that were simply out of reach under more traditional modes of inquiry. In this short course, you will learn to use new tools and will be invited to engage in a broader discussion about a vision toward the future of a social science and how it can be assisted by multimodal signal processing pipelines. We will work mainly from analysis pipelines designed for the beginner programmer as presented on our open science platform www.envisionbox.org, but new user-friendly tools for non-programmers are also introduced by special guests from the Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam (e.g., maskanyone, a tool that masks body and voice data while enriching it with kinematic information for privacy-aware data sharing and archiving). We will reserve time for discussion, and time for you to experiment with a envisionbox module of your choice, while the instructor assists you along the way.
With presentations from:
Martin Schilling (Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam)
Bjoern Benedikt Heyder (Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam)
Babajide Owoyele (Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam)
Jeremy Kuhn – Visible Meaning
Decades of work in formal semantics has shown that logical tools can be applied with great success to the analysis of meaning in natural languages. But human communication involves more than words and sentences; we also express meaning visibly, with depictions and gestures, showing instead of telling. In this course, we will show that the analytical tools of formal semantics can be applied productively to visible meaning as well. In week one, we will establish some basic concepts, and explore the interaction of logical meaning and iconic (visible) meaning in sign languages and gestures. In week two, we will focus on several case studies, with a particular emphasis on form-meaning mismatches in sign languages: negative concord and distributive concord.
Another highlight was the poster sessions, which gave participants the opportunity to present their research. These took place in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays in both weeks. The sessions provided an excellent opportunity for interaction and discussion with other participants and lecturers, as well as valuable feedback on one’s own work. It was a particular pleasure for us that there were so many student poster presentations in the field of visual communication. The book of abstracts can be found here.
Finally, we would like to thank all the organisers, student assistants, lecturers and participants who made the summer school such a success.
(Photos: Mohammed Karim, Theresa Stender)