Composition and projection of co-speech gestures

Esipova, Maria

doi:10.3765/salt.v29i0.4600

Cited by 22 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Thanks to M.Esipova (p.c.) for noticing a typo in an earlier formulation (Esipova 2019. discusses a more general statement of the equivalence, for the case in which the modifiers are not intersective.…”

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confidence: 99%

Iconic presuppositions

Schlenker

2020

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Why are some linguistic inferences treated as presuppositions? This is the 'Triggering Problem', which we attack from a new angle: we investigate highly iconic constructions in gestures (speech-replacing gestures or 'pro-speech gestures') and in signs (classifier predicates in ASL) and show that some regularly trigger presuppositions. These iconic constructions can be created and understood 'on the fly', with two advantages over lexical words: they suggest the existence of a productive 'triggering algorithm', since presuppositions can arguably be generated with no prior exposure to the iconic construction; and they make it possible to minimally modify the target constructions to determine which do and which don't generate presuppositions. Our investigation does not just target standard presuppositions, but also 'cosuppositions', initially defined as conditionalized presuppositions triggered by co-speech gestures. We show that pro-speech gestures and classifier predicates alike can trigger cosuppositions, which are thus an inferential class that goes beyond the confines of co-speech gestures (Aristodemo 2017). Our data argue for a triggering algorithm that can generate presuppositions on iconic grounds, and we offer a generalization of cosupposition theory on which these can be triggered for reasons of manner (co-speech gestures), but also for conceptual reasons.

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confidence: 99%

Iconic presuppositions

Schlenker

2020

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…We may ask: where does domain sit in the structure of a pronoun that is pronounced with a high vertical height, with respect to other changes to pronominal form with semantic consequences, like the arc used for plural referents? There are multiple suggestions on the table in general for morphosyntactic configurations within IX relating to the arrangement of loci, indices, and relevant φ features, including recent proposals by Esipova (2019) and Ahn (2020), and as far as we can see, our data do not arbitrate between them. We will, therefore, make a proposal using fairly simple cumulative presuppositions, the order of which may be implemented differently than we do here depending on one's preferred system.…”

Section: Height As Domain Sizementioning

confidence: 48%

“More is up” for domain restriction in ASL

Davidson

Gagne

2022

S&P

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This paper investigates a form-meaning mapping in American Sign Language (ASL) whereby pronouns, verbs, and quantifiers can be produced progressively higher in signing space to signal a widening of their contextually supplied domains. We show that this is not a gesture-like expression of surprise, uncertainty, or quantity, and is also not equivalent to well-studied domain-widened quantifiers in spoken language, but rather involves reference via plural pronouns in ASL. When appearing with verbs these pronouns are incorporated as arguments and when appearing with quantifiers as a partitive-like domain restriction. In addition, we show that the use of continuous space along the height dimension in ASL allows for gradient interpretations of domain widening and narrowing. We contrast the grammatical functions of this use of height in sign languages with superficially similar gesture and prosody accompanying spoken language.

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“…This is expected on general grounds because presuppositions can be 'locally accommodated' (i.e. turned into the at-issue component) in certain environments, and cosuppositions triggered by co-speech gestures have been argued to be particular prone to this behavior (Schlenker 2018a, Tieu et al 2017, 2018; see also Esipova 2019).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent literature has argued that these gestural expressions trigger cosuppositions, and it has been speculated that this is because they are presented as parasitic on the messages they enrich (both parts are still the subject of intense debates, e.g. Ebert andEbert 2014 andEsipova 2019). Pasternak 2019 extended these findings to co-speech sounds, and a Pasternakian extension to co-speech music is immediate.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical meaning within Super Semantics

Schlenker

2021

Linguist and Philos

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As part of a recent attempt to extend the methods of formal semantics beyond language ('Super Semantics'), it has been claimed that music has an abstract truth-conditional semantics, albeit one that has more in common with iconic semantics than with standard compositional semantics (Schlenker 2017(Schlenker , 2019a. After summarizing this approach and addressing a common objection (here due to Leonard Bernstein), we argue that music semantics should be enriched in three directions by incorporating insights of other areas of Super Semantics. First, it has been claimed by Abusch 2013 that visual narratives make use of discourse referents akin to those we find in language. We argue that a similar conclusion extends to music, and we highlight it by investigating ways in which orchestration and dance may make cross-referential dependencies more explicit. Second, we show that by bringing music semantics closer to the semantics of visual narratives, we can give an account of the semantics of mixed visual and musical sequences. Third, it has been claimed that co-speech gestures trigger characteristic conditionalized presuppositions, called 'cosuppositions', and that their semantic status derives from their parasitic character relative to words (Schlenker 2018a,b). We argue that the same conclusion extends to some instances of film and cartoon music: it may trigger cosuppositions that can be revealed by embedding film excerpts or gifs in sentences so as to test presupposition projection. We further argue that under special discourse conditions (pertaining to certain Questions under Discussion), pro-speech gestures and pro-speech music alike can trigger cosuppositions as well. These results suggest that new insights can be gained not just by extending the methods of semantics to new objects, but also by drawing new connections among them.

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Composition and projection of co-speech gestures

Cited by 22 publications

References 18 publications

Iconic presuppositions

Iconic presuppositions

“More is up” for domain restriction in ASL

Musical meaning within Super Semantics

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