UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN

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.

In this talk, I present ongoing work on the normative dimension of social action and its interactional management in mundane situations. We often think of ‘norms’ and ‘rules’ as guiding our social conduct. However, both philosophical and empirical work has suggested that rules cannot provide for ‘proper’ behaviour, but are only one tool in the management of social order. How else do participants themselves deal with moments of socio-normative (in)acceptability in everyday life? The talk focuses on three emerging findings: (1) Participants to interaction frequently intervene in others’ conduct in everyday life, supporting the view that social order is an on-going accomplishment; (2) Participants strive to intervene early, when such moves are accountable as ‘reminders’ or ‘instructions’, rather than as ‘reprimands’ or ‘complaints’; (3) intervening in and adjusting others’ behaviour is concerned with the action’s practical reasonableness more often than with its (non-) accordance with conventional values and norms, suggesting that sanctioning others is fundamentally about practical and interpersonal needs rather than impersonal prescriptions and proscriptions. The data base for the work presented here is a new cross-language parallel corpus of video recordings of authentic, everyday social events, the ‘Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction’ (PECII).

Deaf Mobility Studies merges the transdisciplinary insights of Deaf Studies and Mobility Studies to explore the unique experiences and interactions of deaf individuals in motion. My presentation is based on findings from the "MobileDeaf" project, funded by the European Research Council from 2017 to 2023. This project scrutinized various forms of mobility, including forced migration in Kenya, labor and marriage migration in London, professional travels across multiple countries, and tourist experiences in Bali, to reveal a spectrum of deaf interactions across international borders. Central to our exploration were four interlinked concepts: languaging, belonging, immobility, and networks. These concepts guided our ethnographic inquiry into how deaf people construct spaces of belonging, engage in dynamic language practices, navigate their immobility, and develop extensive networks. Our research has uncovered that deaf cosmopolitanism is a complex, layered experience where deaf individuals navigate and shape global identities through linguistic dexterity and cross-cultural interactions, yet they also face significant barriers related to accessibility, socio-economic status, and cultural differences. This presentation will introduce new perspectives on how mobility and immobility are experienced and understood within deaf communities.

Researchers rightly note that our understanding of language evolution is predominantly focused on speech, leaving the evolution of gestures and signing largely unexplored (Heine & Kuteva, 2007). Sign linguists address this gap by systematically studying grammaticalization processes in various sign languages (Janzen & Shaffer, 2002; Pfau & Steinbach, 2006) revealing gestures' fundamental role in sign evolution. Yet, the overlooked aspect is that gestures, too, undergo change and stabilization (but see e.g., Kendon, 1988; Ladewig, 2014a; Müller, 2018).

This paper presents the initial findings of a research project on the stabilization of gestures, focusing on a specific type, termed “recurrent gestures” (Harrison & Ladewig, 2021; Ladewig, 2014b, 2024). These co-speech gestures are characterized by their repeated occurrence with the same form and meaning across various communicative contexts and among different speakers. The discussion will explore how stabilization in gestures can be systematically described, using two recurrent gestures as examples: the Cyclic gesture and the Slicing gesture. The Cyclic gesture has been documented in German (Ladewig, 2014a) English, and Farsi (Ruth-Hirrel, 2018) and exhibits systematic variation in form, meaning, and context, along with varying degrees of stabilization. These degrees of stabilization appear to have emerged from different paths of stabilization that are indicative of processes of lexicalization, schematization, and pragmaticalization in spoken and signed language.

In contrast, the Slicing gesture, previously documented in French (Calbris, 2003) and English (Streeck, 2009) (but not in German), displays a different dynamic. It is often part of extended sequences where it acquires a meta-pragmatic meaning, embodying the rhetorical act of making arguments or defining concepts clearly. The paper argues that these gestures differ significantly in their stabilization and functional dynamics.

In conclusion, this paper underscores the role of recurrent gestures as a distinctive semiotic resource in multimodal communication. Through a detailed examination of specific gestures, namely the Cyclic and Slicing gestures, it illuminates the underexplored aspect of gesture stabilization. By demonstrating that gestures not only change but also stabilize through processes similar to those observed in language change, the paper emphasizes the importance of including gestures in studies of the evolution of human expressive modes.

References:

• Calbris, G. (2003). From cutting an object to a clear cut analysis. Gesture as the representation of a preconceptual schema linking concrete actions to abstract notions. Gesture, 3(1), 19-46.
• Harrison, S., & Ladewig, S. H. (2021). Recurrent gestures throughout bodies, languages, and cultural practices. Gesture, 20(2), 153–179. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.21003.har
• Heine, B., & Kuteva, T. (2007). The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction. Oxford University Press.
• Janzen, T., & Shaffer, B. (2002). Gesture as the substrate in the process of ASL grammaticization. In R. P. Meier, K. Cormier, & D. Quinto-Pozos (Eds.), Modality and structure in signed and spoken languages (pp. 199-223). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486777
• Kendon, A. (1988). How gestures can become like words. In F. Poyatos (Ed.), Crosscultural Perspectives in Nonverbal Communication (pp. 131-141). C. J. Hogrefe, Publishers.
• Ladewig, S. H. (2014a). The cyclic gesture. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J. Bressem (Eds.), Body – Language – Communication. An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction (Vol. 38.2, pp. 1605–1618). De Gruyter Mouton.
• Ladewig, S. H. (2014b). Recurrent gestures. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J. Bressem (Eds.), Body – Language – Communication. An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction (Vol. 38.2, pp. 1558–1575). De Gruyter Mouton.
• Ladewig, S. H. (2024). Recurrent Gestures: Cultural, Individual, and Linguistic Dimensions of Meaning Making. In A. Cienki (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies (pp. 32–55). Cambridge University Press.
• Müller, C. (2018). Gesture and Sign: Cataclysmic Break or Dynamic Relations? Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1651. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01651
• Pfau, R., & Steinbach, M. (2006). Modality-independent and Modality-specific Aspects of Grammaticalization in Sign Language. Linguistics in Potsdam 24, 24(3), 3–98.
• Ruth-Hirrel, L. (2018). A construction-based approach to cyclic gesture functions in English and Farsi [Dissertation Thesis, University of New Mexico]. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ling_etds
• Streeck, J. (2009). Gesturecraft: Manufacturing understanding. John Benjamins.

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.

Prepositional relative complementation in Spanish varies with respect to the (non-)usage of the determiner-like element el/la (henceforth DET) in the relative pronoun in sentences such as (1).

1. ¿A qué se opuso Álex?
   “What did Alex object to?”
   
   A un presupuesto con el que / con que organizamos la boda.
   “To a budget with which we organized the wedding.”

Previous studies suggest that the alternation between structures like con el que and con que (henceforth prep+det+que and prep+que) is conditioned by the degree of accessibility of the antecedent in that less accessible antecedents favor DET-usage. According to these studies, one of the most important factors increasing accessibility is definiteness, with definite antecedents being more accessible than indefinites. Animacy is often considered another important factor increasing the accessibility of a discourse referent (Aissen 2003, Comrie 1989, Fukumura & van Gompel 2011, Silverstein 1976), and some authors (Santana Marrero 2004, Levinstein 2022) indicate that human (and by extension, more accessible) antecedents favor DET-usage in Spanish relative complementation. Although this suggests that animacy shows a pattern inverse to definiteness with regard to DET-usage, the interplay between definiteness and animacy is not further commented on in these works. Diachronically, Marttinen Larsson (2023) finds that prep+det+que is continuously extending its usage towards constructions with more accessible antecedents, the endpoint of this development being the usage of prep+det+que even with highly accessible antecedents. However, Marttinen Larsson (2023) equally disregards the role of animacy, meaning that the interaction of animacy and definiteness in Spanish relative complementation requires further exploration.

To address this issue, we present results from cloze and acceptability judgment tasks from Felipe Carrillo Puerto (Mexico) and Valladolid (Spain) in which we investigate the impact of ±definite and ±animate antecedents on relative pronoun production and acceptability. The two main results are as follows: First, prep+que is more likely to be produced (Mexico) or judged as acceptable (Spain) with definite-inanimate antecedents. We argue that the disparity between the Mexican and Spanish data is indicative of different developmental stages of prep+det+que extension in these varieties. Second, animacy only shows an effect in the context of definite antecedents. We conclude that animacy ranks lower compared to definiteness with regard to the impact on prep+(det+)que usage.

References

• Aissen, Judith. 2003. Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy. Natural language & linguistic theory, 21(3), 435-483.
• Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language universals and linguistic typology: Syntax and morphology. UCP.
• Fukumura, Kumiko. & Roger P. Van Gompel. 2011. The effect of animacy on the choice of referring expression. Language and cognitive processes, 26(10), 1472-1504.
• Levinstein Rodriguez, Andrea. 2022. When Articles Go Missing: Analyzing Optionality in Spanish Prepositional Relative Clauses. Master’s thesis, University of Calgary.
• Marrero, Juana. S. 2004. Preposición+(artículo)+que relativo: análisis en la norma lingüística culta panhispánica. Boletín de Lingüística, 16(21).
• Marttinen Larsson, Matti. 2023. Modelling incipient probabilistic grammar change in real time: the grammaticalisation of possessive pronouns in European Spanish locative adverbial constructions. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 19(2), 177-206.
• Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity (pp. 112-171). Humanities Press.

In this talk, I will argue that to extract linguistic information from neural data, three types of signals need to be considered, and their properies: 1) the neural signal; 2) the speech signal; 3) the language signal. I will illustrate the relevance of each signal using two rather opposite experimental approaches, frequency tagging and naturalistic language comprehension.

Frequency tagging suppresses the temporal component of the speech signal, in an attempt to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the neural signal and highlight the structural relations of the speech signal. I will show how the interpretation of the neural signal is entirely tributary to linguistic assumptions.

Current approaches to naturalistic language comprehension exploit the temporal organization of speech and language, suggesting that structure building information is temporally segregated: for example, phrasal structures would be encoded into specific frequency narrowbands. I will show why collating hierarchal structure into time scales may be problematic, and indicate an alternative approach using a mutual information metric which allows to model linguistic annotations into brain data.