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Gestural semantics

Replicating the typology of linguistic inferences with pro- and post-speech gestures

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Abstract

We argue that a large part of the typology of linguistic inferences can be replicated with gestures, including some that one might not have seen before. While gesture research often focuses on co-speech gestures, which co-occur with spoken words, our study is based on pro-speech gestures (which fully replace spoken words) and post-speech gestures (which follow expressions they modify). We argue that pro-speech gestures can trigger several types of inferences besides entailments: presuppositions and anti-presuppositions (derived from Maximize Presupposition), scalar implicatures and ‘Blind Implicatures,’ homogeneity inferences that are characteristic of definite plurals, and some expressive inferences that are characteristic of pejorative terms. We further argue that post-speech gestures trigger inferences that are very close to the supplements contributed by appositive relative clauses. We show in each case that we are not dealing with a translation into spoken language because the fine-grained meanings obtained are tied to the iconic properties of the gestures. Our results argue for a generative mechanism that assigns new meanings a specific place in a rich inferential typology, which might have consequences for the structure of semantic theory and the nature of acquisition algorithms.

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Notes

  1. A note about the terminology: a pro-speech gesture replaces a spoken word, just as a pronoun replaces a noun and a proconsul replaces a consul.

  2. Some related French data were discussed with French-speaking colleagues but are not reported here.

  3. Lexical entries may be rather abstract, as when one posits a special lexical entry for a ‘comma intonation’ in appositive relative clauses (Potts 2005).

  4. We write ‘yes’ in this cell because, on Potts’s analysis, a special lexical entry is needed to handle appositive relative clauses, namely what he calls the ‘comma intonation.’ As hinted in the text, although the phonological realization of this lexical entry is rather abstract (possibly involving just a pause), it involves a semantic specification that does not follow from independent principles and is thus lexical in nature.

  5. In several recent theories (e.g. Spector 2006), an alternative \(S'\) to a sentence S can be negated in case it is non-weaker than S, or in other words if S and not S′ is not contradictory. For instance, The first group member attended may evoke the sentence The second group member attended, which is not more informative, but which can be denied without contradicting the first sentence. The second sentence can thus be negated on this revised view, yielding the inference that the second group member didn’t attend. See for instance Schlenker (2016) for a survey that discusses this issue.

  6. A contradiction is obtained on the assumption, made by Magri and others, that it is presupposed that there are Italians (or more generally that the NP restrictor of some and all has a non-empty denotation).

  7. There are exceptions to this observation, as presuppositions may in some cases be informative, as discussed for instance by Stalnaker (2002), von Fintel (2008), Schlenker (2012).

  8. The length does not just intensify the adjective: it is difficult to understand The talk was shoooort as meaning that the talk was very short.

  9. This expression should be understood by analogy with the ‘projection problem for presuppositions,’ which consists in determining how the presuppositions of complex sentences are inherited from the at-issue and presuppositional contributions of their component parts.

  10. Schlenker (to appear b) speculates that some aspects of the semantics of co-, pro- and post-speech gestures can be derived from broadly Gricean considerations of manner, depending on whether (i) they can be eliminated without affecting the grammaticality of the sentence, and (ii) they have their own time slot.

  11. In this case, x drinks a lot is both structurally more complex and logically stronger than x drinks. But in other cases, a more complex expression is logically weaker. For instance, x drinks or smokes is asymmetrically entailed by x drinks, but it is more complex than it and thus evokes it as an alternative.

  12. See Sect. 5 for a more thorough discussion of unpunctuated repetitions. Suffice it to say for the moment that these involve iterations of an expression in different parts of gestural space, with short and relatively indistinct breaks between the iterations.

  13. Our point is not that the weak reading denying that the speaker saw exactly one cross does not exist, just that it is not the only possible reading (a similar issue arises with numerals in English, we have ‘exactly’ readings in addition to their ‘at least’ readings; see Spector 2013b for a survey).

  14. Two remarks should be added. First, we can check by embedding that it probably has an ‘at least two crosses’ reading (although this need not be the only possible reading): (i)a can be understood to imply in particular that nobody saw at least two crosses, like (i)b and unlike (i)c.

    1. (i)
      figure b

    Second, the issue of finding the ‘right’ alternative to yield the ‘exactly one’ reading of a singular indefinite is not trivial even for the English expression ‘a cross’; see for instance Spector (2007) for discussion.

  15. The ability of subjects to infer the gradient geometric position of an object relative to a ground was used in Emmorey and Herzig (2003) to investigate the iconic uses of classifiers in ASL.

  16. Interestingly, when - appears under negation, as in (i)a, we might well get the inference that the speaker didn’t see any crosses (rather than: the speaker didn’t see more than one cross); this is also the behavior displayed by existential plurals in English, as in I didn’t see crosses (see for instance Spector 2007). But the judgments arguably change when - is replaced with -, as in (i)b: we arguably obtain an inference that the speaker didn’t see a lot of crosses but still saw some crosses. This would be expected if - is evoked as an alternative by -, which is a strictly more complex gesture. But one would still need to explain why (i)a doesn’t evoke the alternative I didn’t see, which should trigger the implicature that the speaker did see one cross.

    1. (i)
      figure c

    We leave this question open here, noting that related issues arise but have yet to be investigated with respect to sign language unpunctuated and punctuated repetitions (see Schlenker and Lamberton to appear).

  17. A further issue is whether, on this ‘exactly that very height’ reading, the height in question counts as tall or not. As a referee observes, facial expressions might play a role in triggering the latter inference (the referee mentions for instance ‘a facial expression with puffy cheeks or widened eyes’).

  18. As an anonymous reviewer notes, if a warm country were replaced with warm counties, (21)a would stop being deviant, and it would trigger the (standard) scalar implicature that not all Italians come from warm counties.

  19. We use two identical pictures for simplicity, but each occurrence of should in fact be realized in a slightly different part of gestural space.

  20. In this case, the larger (more complex) sign, for instance -, was more informative than its subpart (i.e. ), and for this reason the implicature triggered without contextual alternatives had to be an indirect one: with negation, John isn’t- triggers the implicature that John is.

  21. It is standardly assumed that an expression should not be trivial, in the sense that it should not follow from its ‘local context’ (Stalnaker 1978; Schlenker 2009). Applied to the first conjunct (= be on the ground), this requirement amounts to an anti-presupposition. This means that the conjunction be on the ground and then take off is not just a presupposition-free control, but comes with an anti-presupposition on its own. This is a standard problem when one wishes to find controls for presuppositional expressions.

  22. While get behind the wheel might be a bit more natural than be behind the wheel, get behind the wheel triggers the presupposition that the agent is not initially behind the wheel (thanks to E. Chemla and L. Tieu for discussion of this point). As discussed in fn. 21, be behind the wheel only triggers an anti-presupposition to the effect that this expression is not trivial in its local context.

  23. It might be important to realize the gesture so as to evoke sipping rather than doing a (quick) vodka shot, as the latter gesture might weaken or erase the presupposition. Lyn Tieu (p.c.) suggests that a clearer effect might be found if the gesture is modified so as to involve sipping something from a small cup. (Thanks to Lyn Tieu for discussion of this point.)

  24. It might be that - triggers the opposite presupposition, to the effect that the agent is in a shooting position; but the data (and the details of the realization of the gesture) would need to be investigated more closely.

  25. See Schlenker et al. (2013) for a discussion of the optionality of height marking with sign language pronouns. (Note that their examples do not involve similar attempts to make very salient the competition between a high and a normal locus.)

  26. These are just extreme possibilities. It could also be that the algorithm needed for iconic presupposition generation extends to some but not to all presuppositions triggered by spoken words. Let us add that Abrusán’s triggering mechanism (Abrusán 2011), which was developed for the case of spoken words, seems to us to be in a good position to derive several of our gestural results, but we must leave a detailed discussion for another occasion (see Schlenker 2018).

  27. Here and in (44)c, we only mean that the sentence does not trigger the inference that the addressee will in fact take all or none. We do not make a claim as to what is required for the addressee to win the prize; but in this connection the gestural judgments seem to us to be similar to those obtained if _-- is replaced with the spoken words take them.

  28. As Manuel Križ (p.c.) notes, one may in the future study further realizations of the gestural predicate involving a repetition of the verb to indicate a plurality of actions. This option is open in sign language (Kuhn 2015) as well as in gestures (Schlenker 2017), and it would thus be interesting to see how it interacts with homogeneity effects.

  29. Appositive relative clauses display a behavior which is very close to that of clausal parentheticals, as shown in (i)–(ii), and for this reason more sophisticated data would be needed to decide whether post-speech gestures behave like parentheticals or like appositives (as is granted by Schlenker to appear a, to appear b).

    1. (i)
      figure e
    1. (ii)
      figure f

    For present purposes, the difference doesn’t matter, since both classes exhibit varieties of supplemental meanings. (In some restricted environments, appositives can take narrow scope with respect to some logical operators, whereas this is difficult for clausal parentheticals. See Schlenker 2010, 2013a, 2013b for discussion.)

  30. As mentioned in Sect. 2.2.3, Schlenker (to appear a, to appear b) argues that co-speech gestures and co-speech/sign facial expressions display a very different behavior: they are not prohibited in the immediate scope of negative expressions, and they do not trigger supplements, but rather presuppositions whose content is conditionalized on the meaning of the modified expression.

  31. Thanks to Lyn Tieu for discussion of these examples.

  32. Things are complicated by the fact that some sentences of the form (p orq\(q'\)), where q\(q'\) carries a presupposition q, give rise to readings in which the entire sentence presupposes q (see for instance Beaver 2001; Beaver and Geurts 2011; and Schlenker 2016 for discussion of the general issue, often labelled the ‘Proviso Problem’). Our point is that this is not the only possible reading for (53)c, whereas (53)b obligatorily carries the implication that the speaker is in fact prejudiced against the French.

  33. Needless to say, our examples are mentioned, not used. We refrain from including pictures to reduce any offensiveness. We apologize for any offense these examples may cause despite these precautions.

  34. As an anonymous referee suggests, this is certainly the case of co-speech gestures as well: the sentence in (i), where the gesture co-occurs with John, suggests that the speaker is prejudiced against Asian / gay / handicapped people (and that John belongs to the relevant group). We don’t further discuss co-speech gestures here because their interaction with the modified words raises complexities of its own (see for instance Schlenker to appear a).

    1. (i)
      figure g

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Emmanuel Chemla and Lyn Tieu for detailed discussions of every aspect of this piece, and for their considerable patience in discussing examples. I also wish to thank Amir Anvari, Salvador Mascarenhas, Rob Pasternak and Benjamin Spector for discussion of several parts. In addition, I benefited from the suggestions of colleagues at the Paris/Berlin ETAPS meeting (May 7, 2017), as well as from the constructive comments of three anonymous referees and one Editor for Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.

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Correspondence to Philippe Schlenker.

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Grant acknowledgments The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement N°324115–FRONTSEM (PI: Schlenker). Research was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure—PSL Research University. Institut d’Etudes Cognitives is supported by grants ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*.

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Schlenker, P. Gestural semantics. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 37, 735–784 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9414-3

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