We are happy to announce a talk by Sebastian Walter (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: May 15, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Adding to the expressive typology: Emblematic gestures as visual expressives (joint work with Cornelia Ebert)
Abstract:
Emblematic gestures are gestures with a conventionalized form and meaning within a linguistic community. For example, if a speaker in the German-speaking community taps their index finger on their temple, it indicates that they believe the person being referred to is crazy (CRAZY-gesture, henceforth). These gestures differ significantly from iconic gestures, which are typically unconventionalized and depict specific aspects of their referent. While recent work in gesture semantics has largely focused on iconic gestures and their contribution to the meaning of the utterance they co-occur with (e.g., Ebert & Ebert, 2014; Schlenker, 2018), emblems have received comparatively little attention (but see Esipova, 2019). In descriptive work, however, they have been argued to closely resemble interjections, such as ouch (e.g., Poggi, 1983, 1987).
In this talk, we observe that emblematic gestures meet all six criteria of expressive content (e.g., the criteria of independence and perspective dependence) as suggested by Potts (2007). We propose a formal analysis in Gutzmann’s (2015) multidimensional logic, thereby arguing that emblems are instances of expressives in the visual modality of spoken language. We identify two classes emblems: i) THUMBS UP-type gestures, which function largely like interjections and express speaker attitudes independently of propositional content, and ii) CRAZY-type gestures, which resemble expressive adjectives (e.g., fucking in the fucking dog) and require an argument from the asserted content. These types seem to differ in their preferred patterns of gesture-speech alignment, felicity in indirect discourse, and their ability to occur as stand alone instances, i.e., without any co-occurring speech signal.
We model THUMBS UP-type gestures as isolated expletive use-conditional items (UCIs) and CRAZY-type gestures as functional expletive UCIs. Thus, both contribute purely use-conditional meaning. They differ, however, in how this content is integrated into the speech signal and from which perspective they are typically interpreted.