How are recurring gestures built, and do their parts carry meaning like words do? This project investigates whether gesture features such as handshape and movement patterns function as meaningful units, structural elements, or distinctions between meanings. Combining corpus data, experiments, and theory, the research examines how recurrent gestures vary and what features they share. The findings will contribute to a possible morphology of gesture and deepen our understanding of multimodal communication.
Project Members
Silva Ladewig
Principal Investigator
Sign Lab Göttingen, Germany
Project Description
This project explores how compositionality emerges in recurrent gestures and whether recurring parameters such as movement patterns or hand shape function as meaning-bearing units, meaning-differentiating features, or structural elements. Adopting a corpus-based and experimental approach, the project examines formal variation within individual recurrent gestures as well as parameters shared across different gestures.
By systematically investigating (a) which parameters recur within single recurrent gestures and (b) which are shared across recurrent gestures while maintaining the same meaning, the project will build a repertoire of recurring form parameters. Given the uncertain status of these parameters, (c) a theoretical discussion will explore whether gestural form parameters may resemble linguistic units such as morphemes and allomorphs, or whether they instead follow modality-specific principles of composition.