Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University College London (UCL) are pleased to announce the workshop Gestures and Natural Language Semantics: Investigations at the Interface, to be held as a special session of Sinn und Bedeutung 25.
The workshop will take place virtually on 1-2 September 2020.
***Registration for the workshop is now open. Whether you're presenting or just attending, please register!***
The schedule and Zoom links for the invited talks and Q&A sessions can be found here.
To attend the synchronous invited talks, please pre-register via the Zoom links in the schedule by the end of 31 August 2020 (see below for more information).
1. Susan Goldin-Meadow, "From Action to Abstraction: Gesture as a Mechanism of Change", abstract
2. Emar Maier, "The semantics of smiles and smileys", abstract
1. Hans Rutger Bosker & David Peeters, "How Hands Help Us Hear: Evidence for a Manual McGurk Effect", abstract, project page
2. Cornelia Ebert, Andreas Konietzko, & Thomas Weskott, "Recovering Gestured and Spoken Material in VP Ellipsis and Pro-forms", abstract, project page
3. Naomi Francis, "Objecting to discourse moves with gestures", abstract, project page
4. Jonathan Ginzburg & Andy Lücking, "I thought pointing is rude: A dialogue-semantic analysis of pointing at the addressee", abstract, project page
5. Jeremy Kuhn & Louis-Marie Lorin, "A superlinguistics of hyperlink 'pointing'", abstract, project page
6. *Schuyler Laparle, "Multi-modal QUD management: case studies of topic-shifting", abstract, project page
7. Francesca Panzeri & Beatrice Giustolisi, "The role of facial expressions in the recognition of irony", abstract, project page
8. *Francesco Pierini, "Emojis and gestures: a new typology", abstract, project page
The invited presentations are given as synchronous talks via Zoom. The regular presentations are held asynchronously and are accompanied by synchronous Q&A sessions via Zoom. The materials for the asynchronous talks are available on each presentation's OSF project page.
To attend the synchronous invited talks, please pre-register through the Zoom links in the schedule above by the end of 31 August 2020. All registrations will be manually approved, to avoid Zoombombing. After registration and approval, you will receive a confirmation email. This email will contain the line “Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: Click Here to Join”; in order to join the Zoom meeting on 1 and 2 September, please click on “Click Here to Join”.
To enter a Q&A session for the asynchronous talks, please click on the respective link in the schedule above. Please use your full name in Latin script (first name + last name) as your Zoom User Name. There will be a Waiting Room, and we will only admit participants whose User Name is identifiable.
Please note that pre-registration in Zoom is separate from the general registration—please register there as well!
Patrick G. Grosz & Sarah Zobel (University of Oslo)
This workshop aims to bring together researchers who work on gestures (see McNeill 1992, Kendon 2004, Lascarides & Stone 2009, Ebert & Ebert 2014, Schlenker 2018, Esipova 2019), and researchers who work on traditional areas of linguistic research, in order to investigate where gesturally and grammatically expressed meaning intertwine. For more detail, see below.
Gestures have become a core area of investigation in the emerging field of super linguistics, which applies formal linguistic methodology to non-standard objects of study (using ‘super’ in its original Latinate meaning ‘beyond’, see Schlenker & Patel-Grosz 2018). At the same time, there are evident connection points where super linguistic research on gestures meets with formal linguistic research on traditional objects of study.
One such connection point is the domain of pronouns, demonstratives, and other referential expressions -- where gesture has traditionally been discussed as an integral part of successfully establishing the intended meaning: all approaches to deictic pronouns emphasize that some type of pointing (ostension) is crucial to their interpretation. (See Kaplan 1989, Carlson 2004, and for recent, more general discussions of pronominal elements and definite descriptions, Büring 2011, Elbourne 2013.)
A second major connection point concerns prosody, intonation, and discourse structuring, and how they interact with speech-accompanying gestures. Intonation is used in the encoding of information structure, e.g., to mark focus or emphasis, and we know that gestures are highly sensitive to information structural properties. (See Krifka 2008, Féry & Ishihara 2016, Beaver et al. 2017, for relevant background on information structure.) For instance, beat gestures are generally reported to directly encode prosody and prominence, but, much more generally, most speech-accompanying gestures (including spontaneous iconic gestures) are aligned with the focus constituent in a given sentence. Beyond information structure, gestures can also be used to mark speech acts and discourse moves (such as the canceling of a presupposition), especially when we use a broader definition of gestures that includes facial expressions.
To this end, we invite contributions that investigate such interactions between gestural and linguistic communication, thereby explicitly addressing both sides of this research enterprise, broadly construed:
gestures (including facial expressions, pointing arrows in visual narratives, emojis as the substitute for gestures in computer-mediated communication)
natural-language phenomena (including referential expressions [e.g., pronouns or demonstratives], information structure [e.g., focus and prominence, emphasis, prosody], speech acts and discourse moves)
Possible research topics include, but are not limited to, the following, all of which aim to shed new light on questions relating to the above research enterprise:
The gestural inventory (both manual and facial) across languages and cultures (see Kita 2009), and how gestures interact with grammar across languages.
The range of grammatical phenomena in spoken language that can or must be accompanied by gestures.
Types of meaning that can only be expressed by gesture.
Grammatical/Linguistic constraints on the use of gestures.
Differences and similarities between the (non-grammatical/language-external) pointing gestures that accompany speech and the (grammatical/language-internal) pointing signs in sign language (see Fenlon et al. 2019).
Pointing gestures in connection with different types of pronouns, especially pronouns that are not deictic (e.g., French clitic pronouns, Cardinaletti & Starke 1999:153-154).
Cross-cultural variation amongst pointing gestures, both in terms of hand shape (Fenlon et al. 2019) and in terms of whether they are manual or facial (Enfield 2001, Cooperrider & Núñez 2012), including lip pointing and nose pointing.
The semantics of directional arrows in visual/pictorial representations (e.g., Greenberg 2011:162)
Interactions between gestures and prosody / focus (e.g., Ebert, Evert & Wilmes 2011)
Encoding of speech acts by facial-expression gestures (Kuhn & Chemla 2017) and emojis as digital gestures (Gawne & McCulloch 2019)
Speech-accompanying gestures that accompany discourse moves such as presupposition cancellation (Francis 2019)
Interactions between gestures and quotation (cf. Maier 2018)
Scope interactions between gestures and linguistic material.
References
Beaver, D., Roberts, C., Simons, M., & Tonhauser, J. (2017). Questions Under Discussion: Where Information Structure Meets Projective Content. Annual Review of Linguistics 3, 265-284.
Büring, D. (2011). Pronouns. In K. von Heusinger, C. Maienborn, & P. Portner (Eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning (Vol. 2, pp. 971–995). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cardinaletti, A., & Starke, M. (1999). The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In H. van Riemsdijk, Clitics in the languages of Europe (pp. 145-234). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Carlson, G. (2004). Reference. In Laurence R. Horn & Gregory Ward (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 74–96. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Cooperrider, K. & R. Núñez (2012). Nose-pointing: Notes on a facial gesture of Papua New Guinea. Gesture 12, 103-130.
Ebert, C., Evert, S., & Wilmes, K. (2011). Focus Marking via Gestures. Proceedings of Sinn & Bedeutung 15.
Ebert, C., & Ebert, C. (2014). Gestures, demonstratives, and the attributive/referential distinction. Slides from a talk given at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe (SPE 7), ZAS, Berlin, June 2014. Retrieved from https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GJjYzkwN
Elbourne, P. (2013). Definite descriptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Enfield, N. (2001). Lip-pointing: A discussion of form and funtion with reference to data from Laos. Gesture 1, 185-211.
Esipova, M. (2019). Composition and projection in speech and gesture. PhD dissertation, New York University.
Fenlon, J., K. Cooperrider, J. Keane, D. Brentari, & S. Goldin-Meadow (2019). Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing. Glossa – a journal of general linguistics 4, 2.1-26.
Féry, C., & Ishihara, S. (eds.) (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Francis, N. (2019). Objecting to discourse moves: Presupposition denials with "even" and beyond. Ms., MIT.
Gawne, L. & McCulloch, G. (2019). Emoji as Digital Gestures. Language@Internet. URL: https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2019/gawne
Greenberg, G. (2011). The Semiotic Spectrum. PhD dissertation, Rutgers.
Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives. In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kita, S. (2009). Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review. Language and cognitive processes 24, 145-167.
Krifka, M. (2008). Basic Notions of Information Structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55, 243-276.
Kuhn, J. & E. Chemla (2017). Facial Expressions and Speech Acts in Non-signers. Ms., IJN, ENS / Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (CNRS, EHESS, ENS).
Lascarides, A., & Stone, M. (2009). A formal semantic analysis of gesture. Journal of Semantics 26, 393-449.
Maier, E. (2018). Quotation, demonstration, and attraction in sign language role shift. Theoretical Linguistics 44, 265-276.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Schlenker, P. (2018). Gesture projection and cosuppositions. Linguistics and Philosophy 41, 295-365.
Schlenker, P., & Patel-Grosz, P. (2018). What is Super Linguistics? Presentation at workshop “Super Linguistics - an introduction”, University of Oslo, 10th December 2018.