UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Many studies on various languages investigated the marking of information structure (such as focus-background and the degree of givenness of constituents) by prosodic means, in particular by changes in prosodic prominence (see Kügler & Calhoun 2020). There is also a large body of empirical evidence showing a close connection between gestures and information structure, e.g. in that manual gestures tend to mark focus domains and/or new referents (Ebert et al. 2011).

In fact, speech and gestures are often regarded as two parts of the same signal having similar but not necessarily identical functions (McNeill 1992). As a consequence, non-referential co-speech gestures are claimed to be prosodic in nature (Shattuck-Hufnagel & Ren 2018), with their beat component accounting for the rhythm and phrasing of movements of the hands, head or eyebrows. It is a matter of debate, however, which part of a gesture is the most relevant anchor of alignment with the speech signal (e.g. its stroke, apex or peak velocity), and how this alignment contributes to the production and perception of prominence.

Only a few studies have looked at the potential joint effects of spoken and gestural prosody on information structure, among them Türk (2020) on Turkish, Rohrer (2022) on English and Baills & Baumann (2023) on French. While temporal synchronization of the dimensions is confirmed for these typologically diverse languages, it is also shown that beat-like gestures are scarcely used on their own but only in co-occurrence with pitch accents when marking focus and/or givenness. This talk will attempt to give an overview of studies that investigated the division of labour between speech and gesture in the expression of multimodal prominence and their relation to different levels of information structure.

References: • Baills, F. & S. Baumann (2023). The multimodal marking of information status in French as a foreign language: What can we learn about the use of prosodic and gestural cues in an interlanguage? PaPE 2023, Nijmegen. • Ebert, C., S. Evert & K. Wilmes (2011). Focus marking via gestures. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15, 193–208. • Kügler, F. & S. Calhoun (2020). Prosodic encoding of information structure: A typological perspective. In C. Gussenhoven & A. Chen (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language prosody (pp. 454-467). Oxford Academic. • McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago press. • Rohrer, P. (2022). A temporal and pragmatic analysis of gesture-speech association: A corpus-based approach using the novel MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system [Doctoral dissertation]. • Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. & A. Ren (2018). The prosodic characteristics of non-referential co-speech gestures in a sample of academic-lecture-style speech. Frontiers in Psychology 9:1514. • Türk, O. (2020). Gesture, prosody, and information structure synchronization in Turkish [Doctoral dissertation].

The phonetic nature of stress or prominence is a perennial puzzle.  Among the many points of disagreement are: (1) the relation between pitch cues (including “pitch accents”) and cues that are plausibly related to articulatory effort such as duration and intensity; and (2) the phonetic basis of the intuition that some stresses are stronger than others (“stress subordination”).  I suggest that these two problems are connected.  Specifically: at the level of the individual syllable, stress is primarily a matter of articulatory effort, and may even best be regarded as categorically present or absent.  The contribution of pitch is to cue the relative strength of stresses, which is reflected indirectly in the intonational structure of short phrases and utterances.

The idea that stress subordination involves an abstract prosodic structure is of course the founding insight of metrical phonology, but my more specific proposal is that the primary cue to relative prominence is the metrical structure of the intonation contour.  Evidence comes from experimental manipulations of “contrastive topic” in German hat patterns and from languages which allow intonation patterns not found in well-studied Western European languages, such as cues to focus in Greek and Romanian questions. Contrary to what is often assumed on the basis of English, there is no essential phonetic link between high pitch and prominence, and no inherent positional prominence in the last accent of a phrase.  Rather, the basis of relative prominence is abstract metrical strength, and its primary phonetic manifestation is the association of tune and text.

Among deaf people, there exist ideologies—or beliefs and discourses—about various modalities of communication, such as sign language, spoken language, gestures, writing, and fingerspelling. These ideologies reflect our views on the most effective or appropriate ways to communicate in settings like family gatherings, classrooms, or during customer interactions. Through examples from ethnographic research, I will demonstrate how these ideologies influence communication choices. This includes navigating misunderstandings and how past experiences and future prospects shape these ideologies.

For instance, I will discuss the “slippery slope” dilemma of many deaf parents: whether to use spoken language with their hearing children. They aim to prevent communication barriers and the cycle of issues they have faced in their own families. Additionally, I will examine the incorporation of mouthings, writing, and fingerspelling in International Sign (IS), challenging the misconception that “pure IS” lacks these components. I will discuss how people decide which multimodal strategies to employ in IS to ensure clarity. Lastly, the presentation will explore the implications of distinguishing between gestures and sign language on the teaching of sign languages and on the perception of deaf-hearing informal interactions.

In essence, I will show how ideologies surrounding different communication modalities are shaped by and in turn shape our interactions. They influence our choices in expression, the connection of these choices to long-term outcomes, and how people reconcile their communication ideals with reality.

In my talk, I will share insights gleaned from investigating the attitudes of English speakers in a postcolonial context towards five accents of English (American English, British English, Ghanaian English, Jamaican English, and Nigerian English). Utilising a combination of direct (questionnaire and interviews) and indirect (the verbal-guise test) approaches of attitude measurement, I aim to uncover detailed information on the respondents’ perceptions and ideologies regarding these varieties of English. I will also discuss the potential influence of factors such as gender, regional provenance, and level of exposure on their evaluation of accents of English. Finally, I will discuss the implications of my findings with regard to the choice of a linguistic model in a postcolonial context.