We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (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: April 23, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Describing vs. depicting: two ways to convey meaning
Abstract:
In my talk, I will argue that meaning can be conveyed via two fundamentally different methods: (1) descriptively by the use of arbitrary conventionalized signs and (2) depictively by showing or demonstrating certain referents or events and thereby introducing a communicative act that asks the communication partner to extract conceptual or propositional information from this act, e.g. via ad-hoc analogy building. Formal linguistics and semantics in particular have originally only taken care of descriptive and conventionalized expressions and although recently the interplay of linguistic items and depictive components has been investigated, so far the question of what it actually means to interpret a depictive iconic gesture in formal semantics has not been adequately tackled. Here, I want to make some first suggestions towards an answer. I will discuss Ebert & Ebert’s (2014) approach to iconic and pointing gestures and defend one important aspect of this theory, namely the claim that iconic gestures stand for real world objects and function like a pointing gesture pointing to an object in the world. This means that there is a categorical distinction between linguistic expressions on the one hand (‚descriptions‘) and iconic gestures (‚depictions‘ or ‚demonstrations‘) on the other. Linguistic expressions are interpreted by conventions and language rules and translated into expressions of a meta language, while iconic gestures create or stand for concrete objects (or events) in the world. However, the act of presenting or demonstrating these entities adds semantic meaning. Furthermore, the default purpose of depiction seems to be different from that of description. While descriptions are usually used to inform and hence lead to an informative update of the common ground (Stalnaker 1978), depictions often appear to be redundant and do not add additional information. We argue that this observation calls for an extended common ground model that takes care not only of information update and commitment sharing, but also of personal perspective update and experience sharing.