Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints

Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints

The proposed project 'Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints' (GeMeTIC) will investigate how gestures, i.e., hand/body movements and facial expressions, contribute to the meaning of spoken utterances. This question has recently gained substantial traction in formal semantics and pragmatics, but to fully address it, however, one needs to understand how the general potential of gestures to encode meaning is further constrained at various levels of linguistic representation (pragmatics, compositional semantics, syntax, linearization, prosody, articulation) and interfaces between those levels---an issue that still lacks a comprehensive investigation. GeMeTIC will address this gap by comparing the behavior of gestures that contribute "not-at-issue" content, i.e., secondary content added on top of the main message of the utterance, to spoken expressions with similar semantics along a range of dimensions: (i) behavior of not-at-issue gestures and spoken expressions under ellipsis and in attitude reports; (ii) behavior of indexicals (i.e., context-sensitive expressions such as 'I', 'here', and 'now') in the scope of quotative gestures and spoken expressions; (iii) non-compositional interpretations (i.e., interpretations that don't match the syntactic structure of the utterance) of expressive gestures and spoken expressions. The ultimate goal of GeMeTIC will be to build a cross-modal typology of not-at-issue meanings that specifies interface constraints on how different meaning types can be encoded in speech and gesture. To accomplish its empirical goals, GeMeTIC will rely on introspective judgements from individual speakers, corpus data, and quantitative data from experiments conducted online. The theoretical component of the project will bring together two major lines of research in formal linguistics: semantics of gestures and semantics of not-at-issue expressions.