Researchers involved: Jonas Hartke (Lying, deceiving, misleading: are we committed to our gestures?, University of Göttingen) and Sebastian Walter (Visual and Non-visual Means of Perspective Taking in Language, University of Wuppertal)
The collaboration aims at investigating the role the at-issue status of an expression (Potts, 2005)—iconic gestures in the case of the planned collaboration—has on its ability to be used felicitously in lying contexts.
The planned study is based on a commitment-based definition of lying. According to this definition, a speaker lies if, in the course of a communicative act, they acquire a commitment to the truth of the proposition they communicate. Moreover, the speaker must utter the proposition untruthfully (Reins & Wiegmann, 2021). Becoming committed is accompanied by three characteristics: First, the speaker has to face social consequences if the proposition turns out to be false (accountability). Second, the speaker acquires a discursive responsibility to defend the proposition as true (Marsili, 2020). Third, the speaker cannot later deny having communicated the proposition (non-deniability) (Reins & Wiegmann, 2021). Based on the observations of Reins & Wiegmann (2021) and Bonalumi et al. (2022) on commitment, Hartke (2022) proposes a necessarily existing at-issueness as a further component of the commitment definition. In contrast to the traditional definition of lying, lies against the background of this commitment-based definition are not limited to the level of what is said, but can also be realized by means of implicatures (Antomo et al., 2018). Thus, Bonalumi et al. (2020) and Bonalumi et al. (2022) show that a speaker also acquires a commitment in relation to conversational implicatures. Whether this can be extended also to co-speech gestures will be investigated in this collaboration.
According to Hartke (2022), at-issueness is a precondition in order for a speaker to commit themselves to a proposition. Since speech-accompanying (iconic) gestures have been argued to contribute not-at-issue meaning by default (Ebert & Ebert, 2014; Ebert et al., 2020), it is to be expected that the semantic contribution of an iconic gesture cannot be used to lie. However, demonstratives (such as German so) serve as dimension shifters, i.e., they shift the gesture’s meaning contribution more toward the at-issue dimension, but they are still less at-issue than asserted material. The hypothesis is therefore that iconic gestures cannot be used to lie unless they are made at-issue by being aligned to demonstratives like German so. This is in line with recent research which has shown that at-issueness is better conceived of as a gradient notion instead of a binary one (Barnes et al., 2022). This claim is supported by empirical research on appositives (Kroll & Rysling, 2019), ideophones (Barnes et al., 2022), and also on gestures (Walter, 2022). Walter (2022) has investigated differences in at-issueness between so-called character viewpoint gestures (CVGs) and observer viewpoint gestures (OVGs) in an experimental rating study along the lines of those reported in Ebert et al. (2020). The results suggest that although both gesture types contribute not-at-issue meaning by default, CVGs are more at-issue than OVGs. This implies that different gesture types differ with respect to their at-issue status. In a similar vein, gradience is also assumed for the notion of commitment due to a gradable accountability and discursive responsibility (Marsili, 2020; Hartke, 2022).
- Tom wanted a dog for his birthday. Since Tom is still in elementary school, his parents agree with him that they will buy a dog as a family. The dog is still a puppy. At school, Tom wants to impress his crush Elisa. Tom says:
- Meine Eltern haben mir [einen Hund] gekauft. + “big” co-speech gesture
- Meine Eltern haben mir [so einen Hund] gekauft. + “big” co-speech gesture
- Meine Eltern haben mir einen großen Hund gekauft.
In order to investigate Hartke’s (2022) hypothesis, an empirical rating study will be conducted fwhere participants (n=20) will first be presented a written context. Then, the target utterance, consisting of one sentence, will be presented in a video. The purposely false information will come about either via an iconic gesture aligned to a noun (cf. (1a), square brackets indicate gesture-speech alignment), an iconic gesture aligned to so (cf. (1b)), or via an adjective (cf. (1c)). Participants will then have to rate on a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 7 whether the speaker has lied in the given context (1 = has not lied; 7 = has lied). The planned study will be of a single factor design with three levels (MODE: gesture vs. gesture + so vs. adjective).
Assuming that speakers can only be committed to at-issue material, it is hypothesized that the items in the adjective condition can be used best in order to lie. Additionally, since iconic cospeech gestures aligned to German so have been argued to make an at-issue contribution (Ebert et al., 2020), it is hypothesized that gesture + so can also be felicitously used to lie. Finally, iconic gestures aligned to a noun are predicted to be unsuitable to lie as they contribute notat-issue meaning by default and hence a speaker cannot be committed to them (cf. Hartke, 2022). Therefore, significant rating differences between the three conditions are predicted. If the predictions hold, this would provide empirical evidence in favor of Hartke’s (2022) claim that speakers can only commit themselves to at-issue material. In future research, we plan to investigate how a gradient notion of at-issueness and commitment can be connected from a theoretical point of view.