Project Participants


Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ebert
(Principal Investigator)
Goethe University Frankfurt
ebert@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Cornelia Ebert is a professor of linguistics/semantics at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She received her Ph.D. in lingusitics at Potsdam University in 2006. Her thesis was titled »Quantificational topics. A scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena«. She was a lecturer and a researcher at Osnabrück University, Stuttgart University and the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin. Since 2021 she carries out a British-German cooperative research project entitled »Interactions between Dynamic Effects and Alternative-Based Inferences in the Study of Meaning« (IDEALISM). And since 2022 she is one of the coordinators of the DFG Priority Programme 2392 Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives (ViCom). 2020-24 she is Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.
Selected publications
- Barnes, K. R., Ebert, C., Hörnig, R., & Stender, T. (2022). The at-issue status of ideophones in German: An experimental approach. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5827
- Ebert, C., Ebert, C., & Hörnig, R. (2020). Demonstratives as dimension shifters. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 161-178 Pages. https://doi.org/10.18148/SUB/2020.V24I1.859
- Ebert, C. (2018). A comparison of sign language with speech plus gesture. Theoretical Linguistics, 44(3–4), 239–249. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2018-0016
- Ebert, C., Ebert, C., & Hinterwimmer, S. (2014). A unified analysis of conditionals as topics. Linguistics and Philosophy, 37(5), 353–408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-014-9158-4
- Ebert, C. (2009). Quantificational topics: A scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena (Vol. 86). Springer Science & Business Media.


Prof. Dr. Stefan Hinterwimmer
(Principal Investigator)
University of Wuppertal
hinterwimmer@uni-wuppertal.de
Stefan Hinterwimmer’s research interests lie in the realms of semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, information structure and text linguistics. He has worked on adverbial quantification, free relative clauses, conditionals, topicality, specificity, pronoun resolution, the contrast between definite and demonstrative DPs and perspective taking. He received his PhD in 2006 from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is currently Akademischer Rat and Außerplanmäßiger Professor at the Department of German language and literature at the University of Wuppertal.
Selected publications
- Hinterwimmer, Stefan & Umesh Patil. 2022. The Interpretative options of anaphoric complex demonstratives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1), 1–30.
- Hinterwimmer, Stefan, Umesh Patil & Cornelia Ebert. 2021. On the interaction of gestural and linguistic perspective taking. Frontiers in Communication 6. 625757.
- Hinterwimmer, Stefan. 2017. Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts. In D. Burgdorf, J. Collard, S. Maspong & B. Stefánsdóttir (eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 27, 282-301.
- Hinterwimmer, Stefan & David Schueler. 2015. Requantification, underquantification and partial focus in indefinites. Journal of Semantics 32, 749-797.
- Ebert, Christian, Cornelia Ebert & Stefan Hinterwimmer. 2014. A unified analysis of conditionals as topics. Linguistics and Philosophy 37(5). 353–408.


Sebastian Walter
(PhD Candidate)
University of Wuppertal
s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Sebastian Walter completed his MA in linguistics at Goethe-University Frankfurt in September 2022. In October 2022 he joined the project Visual and Non-Visual Means of Perspective Taking in Language as a PhD student. His PhD thesis will investigate the interactions of perspective taking in the spoken and the gestural modality. Besides his research interests on the semantic contribution of speech-accompanying gestures and the expression of perspective in language, he is also interested in at-issueness, modals, conditionals, and verbal mood.
Selected publications
- Ebert, Cornelia, Giovanna Pirillo & Sebastian Walter. 2022. The role of gesture-speech alignment for gesture interpretation. In Sam Featherston, Robin Hörnig, Andreas Konietzko & Sophie von Wietersheim (eds.), Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020, 65–77. Tübingen, Germany: University of Tübingen.
Project Description
Perspective is an important part of the information conveyed by linguistic utterances, and there are many ways in which languages signal whether an utterance is to be understood as expressing the speaker’s or narrator’s perspective or the perspective of some discourse referent. Direct Discourse, Indirect Discourse, Free Indirect Discourse, Protagonist Projection and Viewpoint Shifting are ways of conveying information from a discourse referent’s perspective whose syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties have been investigated extensively (see, e.g, Schlenker 2004, Sharvit 2008, Stokke 2013, Eckardt 2014, Maier 2015, Hinterwimmer 2017, Hinterwimmer 2019, Abrus.n 2020), and it is well known that there are ways to signal the prominence of the speaker’s or narrator’s perspective such as the use of deictic expressions, speech act particle and certain modal verbs (see Zeman 2019 for a recent overview) and the use of demonstrative pronouns to refer to topical protagonists (Hinterwimmer, Brocher and Patil 2020, Hinterwimmer 2020). At the same time, it is well-known that perspective taking can also be expressed at the level of co-speech gestures, i.e. gestures that speakers produce while uttering sentences (see Ebert & Ebert 2014, Schlenker 2018, and Ebert, Ebert & Hörnig 2020 for recent analyses of co-speech gestures in the formal semantic realm). In particular, there are two kinds of iconic gestures that are often used by speakers when they describe scenes or events to their interlocuters and that clearly reveal a perspective: character viewpoint gestures (CVG), on the one hand, and observer viewpoint gestures (OVG), on the other (McNeill 1992, Parrill 2010, 2012, Stec 2012, 2016). When performing the former, the speaker impersonates an individual participating in the event described by the sentence and enacts the event from that person’s point of view by using her entire body in combination with facial expressions. When performing the latter, in contrast, the speaker depicts the event described by the sentence as if it was observed from a distance, usually by using the hands exclusively which then represent a participant, with the hand’s trajectory representing that participant’s path, for instance.
What has not been investigated systematically, however, is the interaction of linguistic and gestural perspective taking (but see Hinterwimmer, Patil and Ebert 2020 and Ebert and Hinterwimmer to appear for first steps). Our goal in this project is therefore to arrive at a better understanding of how the two types of perspective taking interact. In particular, we want to address the following questions via experimental methods such as acceptability rating and forced-choice studies: Is there a preference for the perspectives expressed on the linguistic and the gestural level to be aligned? If so, how strong is this preference and under what conditions can it be overwritten? Is there a difference between the various kinds of perspective taking in this regard? On the basis of the experimental evidence we will develop a theoretical model of how the perspectival information conveyed on the two levels is integrated in such a way that it conveys a single coherent message. This will not only have important ramifications for our understanding of perspective taking but for the interaction of speech and co-speech gestures more generally.