There will be a talk by Cornelia Ebert (GU) in the _Bochum Language Colloquium_ on November 5. You can find the abstract below.
Please note that there will be no Semantics Colloquium in Frankfurt on November 5, so this talk might be a good alternative for anyone who wanted to participate in the Semantics Colloquium on Thursday, since it takes place at the regular meeting time of our colloquium.
*Title:* Semantic Effects of Gesture-Speech Alignment
*Date/Time:* 05 November, 16:15–17:45 CEST
Zoom Meeting-ID: 840 1405 1687 ; Password: 9AKcXf
*Abstract:* Ebert & Ebert (2014) argue that the semantic contribution of a co-speech gesture is partly determined by the temporal alignment of gesture and speech. They claim that an iconic gesture (e.g. a manual gesture depicting „square“ or a square object) that accompanies an indefinite (‚a window‚) makes a different contribution than the same gesture that accompanies a definite (‚the window‚) or one that is temporally aligned only with the NP complement (‚window‚). Crucially, it is argued that gesture alignment with a full DP (e.g. a window or the window) gives rise to an interpretation of comparison, i.e. it is required that the gesture concept be similar or identical to the speech concept. In the case of alignment with only the NP complement (window), an interpretation of exemplification is triggered. The speaker simply exemplifies the NP concept, here: window, and illustrates a prototypical type of window. In my talk, I will report the results of a rating experiments that corroborate this claim. We interpret our findings as a general experimental confirmation of the often-made claim that the semantic contribution of a gesture is determined by its accompanying speech expression.