What makes an utterance "well-formed"? How can one tell the difference between ungrammaticality, infelicity, and anomaly? Can gestures and images be "ungrammatical"? A multimodal approach to language seriously complicates the pursuit of these questions. The concept of grammaticality helps to set boundaries between "language", as a conventionalized system, from communication more generally. My work on grammar as an embodied and situated system works toward deconstructing those boundaries by fully engaging in the semiotic diversity and complexity of everyday communication.
Grammar in interaction
This work looks at the ways in which face-to-face interaction is coherently structured through multimodal utterances. I am particularly interested in the considering the ways in which interactional contexts constrain both spoken and gestured expressions, and how formal predictive models can capture this systematicity.
Related work:
2023. How important is it? The role of hand gestures in managing attentional states. 1st International Multimodal Communication Symposium. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. [slides]
2021. Tracking discourse topics in co-speech gesture. In: Duffy V.G. (Ed.), Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management: Human Body, Motion and Behavior (pp. 233-249). Springer, Cham. [paper]
Multimodal constructions
Do gesture and speech contribute meaning independently? To what extent are gesture-speech alignments conventionalized? In this work, I explore how gestural and lexical expressions interact.
Related work:
2023. Moving past the lexical affiliate with a frame-based analysis of gesture meaning. In Proceedings of GESPIN 2023. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands. [paper; poster]
2020. Multi-modal QUD management: case studies of topic-shifting. Sinn und Bedeutung 25. [abstract; project page]
Infelicity and the syntax-discourse interface
Are there such things as "canonical" and "marked" constructions? How does context reduce markedness? In this work, I look at the ways in which discourse context influences judgements of "naturalness", arguing that grammaticality is a functional, not just structural, notion.
Related work:
2020. At the syntax-pragmatics interface: a quantitative study of aspect in locative inversion. In: Asatryan, S., Song, Y., and Whitmal, A. (Eds.), NELS 50: Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, volume 3, (pp. 153–162). Amherst, MA: GLSA. [paper; poster]
2019. Locative inversion without inversion. In: Baird, M (Ed.), NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (pp. 199–208). Amherst, MA: GLSA. [paper; poster]