Work

The role of gesture in ʔayʔajuθəm determiners and demonstratives

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: This paper examines the contribution of co-speech gesture with determiners and demonstratives in ʔayʔaǰuθəm (ISO 639-3: coo), an endangered Salish language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. Using a small experiment designed after similar work by Ebert et al. (2020) on German, we show that gestural content is not-at-issue accompanying ʔayʔaǰuθəm determiners but shifts to the at-issue dimension with at least one class of demonstratives, the so-called “gesture demonstratives”. The experiment also confirms Ebert et al.’s observation that co-speech gesture makes different contributions with indefinite-like versus definite-like determiners. Overall, the findings suggest that speech-accompanying gestures are interpreted similarly even in unrelated languages with quite different systems of determiners and demonstratives.

Source: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung

DOI: 10.18148/sub/2024.v28.1157

Authors: Reisinger, D. K. E., Huijsmans, Marianne

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

OpenAlex ID: W6907019376

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