Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus

Abstract

The status of content-bearing co-speech gestures, i.e., gestural adjuncts co-occurring with the verbal expressions they adjoin to, has recently become a matter of debate in formal semantics and pragmatics (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Ebert 2017; Tieu et al. 2017; 2018; Esipova 2018; Schlenker 2018; Zlogar & Davidson 2018). The general tendency has been to claim that co-speech gestures by default make not-at-issue contributions, however, the existing analyses differ in whether they in principle allow for at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures and, if yes, in how much cost such at-issue interpretations can incur. In this study I use an acceptability judgement task to investigate the acceptability of at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures forced by contrastive focus, as well as some factors that can potentially affect that acceptability. I conclude that while the overall results are in principle compatible with any analysis that posits a (strong) bias against at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures, further inspection of individual variation in judgement patterns allows us to argue against analyses in which the level of such bias is fixed across speakers. In particular, the variation data can be taken as evidence against the analysis of co-speech gestures as Pottsian (2005) supplements akin to appositives (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Ebert 2017). As for the factors that can potentially affect the acceptability of at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures under contrastive focus, neither the type of content encoded by the gesture, nor emphatic production of co-speech gestures have been found to have an effect.

Composition and projection of co-speech gestures

“…There are at least two conceivable local interpretations for co-speech gestures. One is that of a restricting modifier (which I will label 'Restricting'), and the other is a hypothetical interpretation corresponding to a locally interpreted NRM inference or a locally interpreted supplement (which I will label 'Non-projecting non-restricting'), as illustrated in (21) Previous experimental studies on gesture projection (Tieu et al 2017(Tieu et al , 2018Esipova 2019) concluded that local interpretations of co-speech gestures are in principle possible, but none of them was designed to distinguish between the two types of local interpretations above. The goal of this study is to do so and to test the relevant predictions of the three theories via an acceptability judgement task.…”

The role of gesture in the English ish-construction

“…There is wide agreement that co-speech gesture conveys not-at-issue content (Ebert andEbert 2014, Tieu et al 2018). That is, co-speech gestures tend to project within embedding contexts (Esipova 2019), and cannot be directly denied (Ebert and Ebert 2014). It is less clear whether co-speech gestures can contribute at-issue content, although the emphasis on their not-at-issueness implies not.…”

“…One potential reason for the variability in acceptability judgements, and perhaps the lower acceptability for utterances with co-speech gestures, is that the above studies use a quite artificial setting. For example, Zlogar and Davidson (2018) and Esipova (2019) use video of a single speaker standing against a plain background using constructed iconic gestures. While this methodology does an excellent job of controlling for other variables, perhaps participants vary in their willingness to accept the artificial construct of the task.…”

“…Recent work in multiple subfields of linguistics has investigated the role of gesture in spoken languages. For example, semanticists have been making inquiries into what meaning CO-SPEECH GESTURES contribute to an utterance (Esipova 2019, Tieu et al 2018, Zlogar and Davidson 2018. At the same time, variationist sociolinguists have been exploring the role of EMBODIMENT in structuring linguistic variation and what social meaning is conveyed by embodiment , Voight et al 2016.…”

“…I argue that such a contribution can be seen as a not-at-issue contribution to the utterance. Because work in semantics has suggested that co-speech gestures can provide not-at-issue content (Esipova 2019), the role of gesture in conveying affect thus provides a link between this field and sociolinguistics for future research.…”