Dates: 07.08.-11.08.23
During the second week of the ESSLLI Summer School at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Cornelia Ebert and Markus Steinbach gave lectures on “The Semantics of Visual Communication. Theoretical approaches to visual aspects of meaning in co-speech gestures and sign language”.
In this course, they discussed selected examples illustrating the expressive power of visual communication and explored recent formal accounts that have extended the linguistic apparatus to develop formally precise theories capable of addressing and modeling the semantics of visual and multimodal communication.
Over the course of the week, they showed participants that it is now clear that the formal linguistic repertoire needs to be extended to take account of the modality-specific requirements of visual communication, such as the higher degree of iconicity of gestures and signs, the systematic use of the body of the speaker or signer and the space in front of the body to express, for example, logical variables, comparative constructions, tense, topographic relations or context shift, and the possibility of demonstrating actions and events.
