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Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints (completed)

The project investigated channel-independent universals of meaning composition and channel-specific constraints on meaning expression.

About the project

When we speak, we convey meaning via various means: lexicalized spoken morphemes; less lexicalized vocalizations (vocal gestures); movements of the hands, face, or other parts of the body (body gestures) of varied lexicalization status; prosody, including non-obligatory modulations of the prosodic structure (prosodic gestures).

There are, furthermore, different types of meaning we can convey: we can exchange facts about the world, performatively express our immediate emotions or aspects of our identity, communicate our non-immediate attitudes, etc.

This project investigated how different types of truth-based, but not-at-issue (e.g., quotative, optative, mirative, etc.) and non-truth-based (e.g., expressive) meaning are conveyed via various means, with focus on gesture, broadly construed.

Objectives

The project aimed to study the following empirical questions and their theoretical implications for different types of not-at-issue and non-truth-based meaning, systematically comparing gestural and non-gestural means of meaning expression:

  1. Does the target piece of meaning have to interact semantically with its syntactic surroundings?
  2. To what extent can the target piece of meaning be ignored under ellipsis and in attitude reports?
  3. How does the target piece of meaning interact with indexicality, i.e., context-dependence, namely, how rigidly is it itself anchored to the context of the utterance, and/or how does its presence affect the interpretation of other context-dependent meanings?

Duration

01.09.2020-31.08.2022

Output

Publications

  • Esipova, Maria. 2022. Reps and representations: a warm-up to a grammar of lifting. To appear in Linguistics and Philosophy (special issue 'Super Linguistics').
    preprint (ling.auf.net) 
  • Esipova, Maria. 2021. On not-at-issueness in pictures. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 6(1), 83. DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1314 (doi.org)
  • Esipova, Maria. 2021. What I will tell you about "matrix" wh-"exclamatives"! To appear in Proceedings of West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 39preprint (ling.auf.net)

Presentations

Invited talks

  • 2022. Performativity and architecture. Buenos Aires Linguistics and Philosophy of Language Group, April 20.
  • 2022. Performative expression of meaning and the architecture of grammar. GLiF Seminar, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, March 10.
  • 2022. Preservation of prejudice: elliptical responses to antecedents with slurs. 'You're on mute' ellipsis seminar, NYU, January 28.
  • 2022. The silence of the slurs: inferences about prejudice under ellipsis. V-NYI 4 general lecture, January 12.
  • 2021. Facts and feelings: a cross-channel typology of affective content. The Northern Scholars Lectures, University of Edinburgh, March 24. (virtual)
  • 2020. Composure and composition: towards a cross-modal typology of affective content. New York Philosophy of Language workshop, NYU, October 26. (virtual)

Conferences and workshops with peer-reviewed abstracts

  • 2022. Lack of composure, lack of composition. Expression, Language, and Music (ELM), University of Connecticut, August 20–22.
  • 2022. Annoyance and architecture: lessons from Russian OY DA sentences. Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) 31, McMaster University, June 24–26.
  • 2022. Can slurs be used without being mentioned? Evidence from an inference judgment task. Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 2, University of Pennsylvania, May 18–20. (short talk)
  • 2022. From performatives to performances. DGfS Workshop: Visual Communication. New Theoretical and Empirical Developments, February 23–25.
  • 2021. What I will tell you about Russian wh-"exclamatives"! Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) 30, MIT, May 13–16. (virtual)
  • 2021. What I will tell you about "matrix" wh-"exclamatives"! West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 39, University of Arizona, April 8–11. (virtual, poster)

Other communication/dissemination activities

PerForum workshop

A one-day interdisciplinary workshop, organized by Maria Esipova as part of the GeMeTIC project, was held at UiO on June 3, 2022. The workshop brought together researchers from various disciplines interested in performative expression of meaning in language and beyond. 

Summer/winter schools

  • Summer 2022. Omni-Linguistics. 
  • Summer 2022. Super Linguistics. 
  • Summer 2021. Some Issues with Not-at-issueness. 
  • Winter 2021. Meaning Across Modalities. 


The EU-flag.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 891493.

Published Nov. 16, 2021 9:57 AM - Last modified Dec. 8, 2023 12:54 PM

Contact

Project leader:

Mariia Esipova

Participants

Detailed list of participants