Multimodal Negation: Foundations and Dynamics

Pre-Conference Workshop at the 10th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies

Date & Time: 8 July 2025, 9 - 12.30

Location: Max Planck Institute  for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Registration: here

Overview

Gesture’s links with negation have historically featured in the work of major scholars and landmark texts, arguably playing a role in the development of contemporary gesture studies. Theoretical and methodological innovations in multimodal language research have given rise to a domain of multimodal negation that attracts attention from spoken and signed language researchers. Shaped by methods of gesture analysis and multimodal research techniques, findings from contemporary studies of negation offer insights on the specifics of multimodal language development, use, and meaning-making, as well as more broadly on the nature of gesture, understanding, and perception. This workshop aims to develop the foundations and dynamics of the research domain, convening scholars of multimodal negation across spoken and signed language fields, and focusing on typological accounts, corpus-based research, and comparative points of view.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

• 9:00-9:05: Opening

• 9:05-9:35: The family of away gestures: An emerging kinesic-semantic network (Cornelia Müller, European University Viadrina Frankfurt)

• 9:35-10:05: The development of multimodal negation: Integrating prosody and gesture (Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Sorbonne Université; Christelle Dodane, Sorbonne Nouvelle University; Aliyah Morgenstern, Sorbonne Nouvelle University)

• 10:05-10:35: Gestures associated with negation among children speaking Jakarta Indonesian (Anna Inbar, Levinsky-Wingate Academic College & University of Haifa; Poppy Siahaan, University of Cologne)

• 10:35-10:55: Break

• 10:55-11:25: Phonetic properties of negative headshake across sign languages (Vadim Kimmelman, University of Bergen; Anastasia Bauer, University of Cologne; Carl Börstell, University of Bergen; Jan Bulla, University of Bergen; Alla Bux, University of Bergen; Laurence Crettenand, University of Bergen; Lorena Figueiredo, University of Bergen; Anna Kuder, University of Cologne; Hannah Lutzenberger, Stockholm University & University of Birmingham; Marloes Oomen, University of Amsterdam; Roland Pfau, University of Amsterdam)

• 11:25-11:55: On the interplay between manual negators and head movements in Turkish Sign Language: A dialogic corpus study (Hasan Dikyuva, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & University of Amsterdam; Asli Ozyurek, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & Radboud University; Beyza Sümer, University of Amsterdam; Roland Pfau, University of Amsterdam)

• 11:55-12:25: Multimodal negation from a comparative point of view: Gesture and speech, text and image (Ellen Fricke, Chemnitz University of Technology )

• 12:25-12:30: Closing Remarks

Workshop Speakers and Abstracts

Organisers

Simon Harrison, City University of Hong Kong

Silva Ladewig, Georg-August-University of Göttingen

Suwei Wu, China University of Petroleum-Beijing

Beyza Sümer, University of Amsterdam 

Hasan Dikyuva, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank Asli Ozyurek and Judith Holler at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the organising committee of the ISGS 2025 conference for generously supporting our event.