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Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus

Paper · 2019 · Maria Esipova

Summary

The paper examines whether content-bearing co-speech gestures, which normally add side information that survives embedding (for example under might), can be read as ordinary restrictive modifiers that contribute to the main assertion. Competing formal accounts disagree on this. Under the approach that models gestures on appositives (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Ebert 2017), such readings are excluded. Schlenker's (2018) cosuppositional analysis permits them, either at a cost (obligatory triggering) or freely (optional triggering).

Esipova ran an acceptability judgement experiment with video stimuli. Contrastive focus was placed so that the sentence only made sense if the gesture was at-issue, and these items were compared with controls that did not force that reading. She also varied the gesture's content (size vs. shape) and its production (emphatic vs. non-emphatic).

On average, the forced at-issue items were rated lower, which fits any account with a bias against at-issue gestures. Individual participants, however, differed widely. This variation argues against treating gestures uniformly as supplements and against any account in which the cost is the same for every speaker. Neither content type nor emphasis affected acceptability.

Key points

  • Three families of analyses are compared:
    • supplemental (Pottsian supplements);
    • cosuppositional, in obligatory and optional versions, with at-issue readings arising through local accommodation of conditional presuppositions of the form V ⇒ G;
    • the author's hybrid NP/DP-level account (Esipova 2018).
  • Method: an acceptability judgement task with video stimuli. Contrastive focus forced restrictive readings of gestures (e.g., "a beer small or a beer large"), and the results were compared against non-forcing controls.
  • Main finding: forced at-issue gestures are degraded overall, but judgement patterns vary strongly across individuals.
  • Size and shape gestures behaved alike. Emphatic production (accelerated movement vs. no movement) had no effect.
  • On emphasis specifically:
    • The emphatic and non-emphatic versions shared the same audio track.
    • Some participants believed the two blocks contained identical videos.
    • Linguists consulted during piloting attributed the difference to vocal pitch.
  • Raw data and appendices (instructions, list of examples) are published as additional files. The study was IRB-exempt at NYU.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Contrastive focus works as a forcing diagnostic: a construction such as "X-modifier or Y-modifier" is felicitous only if the modifier restricts the noun, so it reveals whether that reading is available.
  • I2. A projection test under modals separates side content from main content: appositive information survives under might, while a restrictive modifier does not.
  • I3. When projecting two presuppositions would produce a contradiction (stopped smoking vs. started smoking), each one is accommodated locally inside its own maybe branch instead of globally.
  • I4. Breaking aggregate results down by individual judgement patterns exposed a conclusion that the averages concealed, namely that the bias is not fixed across speakers.
  • I5. Minimal-pair stimuli held everything constant except one factor, here the same audio with only the gesture's kinetics changed, and participants' misattributions were recorded as evidence.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): prag could use contrastive disjunctions as a cue to classify a modifier as restrictive (part of the claim) rather than descriptive side content.
  • I2 (world): material from appositives and non-restrictive relatives could be stored as unconditional speaker commitments, while restrictive modifiers stay inside the hypothetical branch the modal opens.
  • I3 (world): the world builder could detect conflicting presupposed states and confine each to its modal alternative rather than flagging the text as inconsistent.
  • I4 (learn): when witness parsers or LLM teacher tiers disagree, cluster their disagreement patterns rather than averaging, since systematic subgroups may signal genuinely ambiguous constructions.
  • I5 (learn): negative controls could change exactly one feature of an input and check whether the system's explanation names that feature or wrongly credits another.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓New York UniversityNew York · United States136 works · 86,390 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

Cite

Cite as Maria Esipova. 2019. Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.635

@article{esipova2019acceptability,
  title = {{Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus}},
  author = {Maria Esipova},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.635},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.635}
}

References

25 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  3. Chemla, Emmanuel & Lewis Bott. 2013. Processing presuppositions: Dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(3). 241–260. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.615221 Cohen, Barry H. 2014. Explaining psychological statistics. Somerset, NJ: John Wiley & Sons 4th edn. ↗
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  14. R Core Team. 2017. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing Vienna, Austria. https://www.Rproject.org. ↗
  15. Schlenker, Philippe. 2009. Local contexts. Semantics and Pragmatics 2(3). 1–78. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.2.3 ↗
  16. Schlenker, Philippe. 2018. Gesture projection and cosuppositions. Linguistics and Philosophy 41(3). 295–365. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9225-8 ↗
  17. Tieu, Lyn, Robert Pasternak, Philippe Schlenker & Emmanuel Chemla. 2017. Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from truth-value judgment and picture selection tasks. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1). 102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.334 ↗
  18. Tieu, Lyn, Robert Pasternak, Philippe Schlenker & Emmanuel Chemla. 2018. Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3(1). 109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.580 ↗
  19. Umbach, Carla. 2006. Non-restrictive modification and backgrounding. In Beáta Gyuris, Kálmán László, Cristoph Piñón & Károly Varasdi (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium on Logic and Language, 152–159. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences. find
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  21. How to cite this article: Esipova, Maria. 2019. Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 11. 1–22, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.635 ↗
  22. Submitted: 16 February 2018 find
  23. Accepted: 27 September 2018 find
  24. Published: 21 January 2019 find
  25. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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