How do gestures add meaning beyond spoken words? This project investigates the iconic content of co-speech gestures, such as using the hands to show that an object is large. Through experiments and formal semantic analysis, the research examines how gesture meaning behaves compared with presuppositions and supplementary information. The findings will clarify how gestures contribute hidden or backgrounded meaning in human communication.
Project Members
Judith Tonhauser
Principal Investigator
University of Stuttgart , Germany
Tina Nägele
PHD CANDIDATE
UNiversity of Stuttgart, Germany
Project Description
The proposed project is concerned with iconic content of co-speech gestures, such as BIG in (1), which conveys that the bottle that Cornelia brought is big:
Cornelia brought [a bottle]_BIG
(BIG: lower bound of imaginary object indicated with one hand and upper with the other, with palms facing each other and far apart)
While there is general agreement in the literature that the iconic content of co-speech gestures is not-at-issue, it is well-known that not-at-issue content is heterogeneous and varies on a number of dimensions, including at-issueness, projection, entailment, Strong Contextual Felicity, and Obligatory Local Effect. In contrast to well-studied not-at-issue content, like supplements and presuppositions, the empirical properties of the iconic content of co-speech gestures are much less well-understood.
As a consequence, it is not clear how the iconic content of co-speech gestures fits into the taxonomy of not-at-issue content. Furthermore, formal analyses of the iconic content of co-speech gestures disagree about which contents such gestures contribute to utterance meaning and which properties these contents have. For instance, extant analyses differ in whether they assume them to pattern like supplements (Ebert and Ebert 2014), presuppositions (Schlenker 2018), or to display variation depending on syntactic factors (Esipova 2019b).
To address these gaps, the proposed project will investigate five empirical properties of the iconic content of co-speech gestures (at-issueness, projection, entailment, Strong Contextual Felicity, Obligatory Local Effect) and it will compare such content to other types of not-at-issue content, including presuppositions and supplements. The results of these experiments will contribute to our understanding of the empirical properties of the iconic content of co-speech gestures. They will also allow us to identify how the iconic content of co-speech gestures fits into the taxonomy of not-at-issue content and to evaluate which formal analyses are empirically adequate. More broadly, the methods and results of the proposed project will provide a basis for future empirical investigations of a broader set of gestural contents.