On September 15, Kita arrived in Frankfurt from Leipzig, beginning his stay with a rich cultural program: a visit to the Goethe Haus combined with stimulating discussions on research and academia over coffee and cake.
The highlight of his Frankfurt visit was a focused workshop at Goethe University on iconicity and ideophones as well as the syntax and semantics of gesture. The workshop brought together participants from Frankfurt-based ViCom projects and associated members from Göttingen, creating a fruitful exchange. Discussions covered a diverse landscape of topics, including the alignment of prosody and gesture, ideophones across spoken and visual modalities, ideophones in Cantonese, Ga and German, as well as the syntax and semantics of co- and pro-speech gestures.
A special highlight was Kita’s own contribution: a perfectly fitting talk on semantic parallels between ideophones and iconic gesture, which built a bridge across the workshop’s themes.
The workshop concluded with lively rotating coffee discussions in smaller groups, where participants exchanged ideas about their individual research, possible contributions to linguistic models, goals of ViCom in its second phase, and first thoughts about future collaborations.
It was a wonderful, insightful, and inspiring stay in Frankfurt, full of many new points of connection for the future.
