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Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments

Paper · 2018 · Lyn Tieu, Robert Pasternak, Philippe Schlenker et al.

Summary

Co-speech gestures, such as pointing upward while saying "use the stairs," add meaning to an utterance. The open question is how that added meaning behaves under negation or quantifiers. Three accounts compete. Gestures may be ordinary at-issue modifiers, appositive-like supplements (Ebert & Ebert 2014), or cosuppositions, meaning presuppositions conditioned on the content of the words they accompany (Schlenker 2018a; b). An earlier study (Tieu et al. 2017) used truth-value and picture-selection tasks and reported existential projection. This study switches to an Inferential Judgment Task, which sits closer to the introspective judgments theorists rely on. Participants rated how strongly a sentence with an UP or DOWN gesture supports a directional inference, in six linguistic environments. These ratings were compared with spoken at-issue controls ("in this direction"). The results:

  • The conditional inference survived negation.
  • It projected universally from "none" and "exactly one."
  • There were hints of local accommodation under negation and "none."

This pattern is hard for at-issue and supplement accounts but fits the cosuppositional view. It also links gesture meaning to verbal presupposition.

Key points

  • Stimuli: UP and DOWN gestures were aligned with a verb phrase (e.g., using the stairs) and placed in six environments, including negation, "none," and "exactly one." Each target was paired with an at-issue control that spoke the modifier aloud.
  • Formal proposal: a gesture G with content g on expression d presupposes d ⇒ g (generalized entailment). The proposal is stated in dynamic semantics (Heim 1983; Schlenker 2009).
  • Existential vs. universal: endorsement of existential and universal versions of the inference did not differ. The authors read this as universal projection, in contrast with the existential pattern from the earlier TVJT/Picture Selection study.
  • Accommodation: endorsement under negation and "none" was relatively low, which the authors explain through partial local accommodation. They concede that controls score low partly because their asserted content blocks the inference.
  • Publication and ethics: Glossa 3(1): 109. Ethics approval was granted by CERES, number 2013/46.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Test an existential and a universal version of the same inference side by side; if they are endorsed equally, the existential "reading" is likely just a consequence of the universal one.
  • I2. Add a condition in which the sentence gives no support to the target inference and does not rule it out either. Use it as a baseline for "can't tell" behaviour, so low scores are not misread as rejection.
  • I3. Treat non-asserted modifier content as a conditional constraint ("if the event happens, it has property g") rather than as an asserted fact, so it survives negation without implying the event occurred.
  • I4. Diagnose the meaning type of a contribution by checking which paraphrase stays acceptable under operators: restrictive modifier, appositive, or presupposition.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): when prag projects a presupposition out of "no"/"none" quantifiers, it could generate both readings and prefer the universal one unless evidence favours the weaker one.
  • I2 (learn): evaluation suites could include such neutral items as negative controls, separating real model refusals from mere uncertainty.
  • I3 (world): store gesture-like or backgrounded modifiers as conditional properties on entities and events, so a negated event still carries its hypothetical manner.
  • I4 (back): generation can use the same test to decide whether a modifier should surface as a restrictive phrase or an appositive clause when it sits under negation.

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🎓Macquarie UniversitySydney · Australia17 works · 4,827 citations🎓Stony Brook UniversityStony Brook · United States27 works · 2,057 citations🔬École Normale Supérieure - PSLParis · France12 works · 3,399 citations🎓Université Paris Sciences et LettresParis · France9 works · 2,361 citations🔬Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et PsycholinguistiqueParis · France4 works · 847 citations🔬Institut Jean NicodParis · France6 works · 1,359 citations🔬ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its DisordersSydney · Australia2 works · 182 citations

Also on the byline: Western Sydney University · New York University Paris.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

Cite

Cite as Lyn Tieu, Robert Pasternak, Philippe Schlenker and Emmanuel Chemla. 2018. Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments. 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.580

@article{tieu2018co,
  title = {{Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments}},
  author = {Lyn Tieu, Robert Pasternak, Philippe Schlenker and Emmanuel Chemla},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.580},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.580}
}

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  29. How to cite this article: Tieu, Lyn, Robert Pasternak, Philippe Schlenker and Emmanuel Chemla. 2018. Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 109. 1–21, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.580 ↗
  30. Submitted: 05 December 2017 find
  31. Published: 16 October 2018 find
  32. Copyright: © 2018 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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