A new approach to analysing static locative expressions

Abstract

As speakers, we are frequently called upon to specify the locations of objects and landmarks in our environment. However, despite the considerable body of work on spatial cognition and semantics (i.e. Levinson 1992, 1996, 2003; Tyler and Evans 2003; Herskovits 1986; Vandeloise 1986), there has been almost no research on the expression of location from a multimodal viewpoint: that is, how do speakers use gesture, as well as speech, to express object location? This paper reports on a filmed study of 10 English speakers and 10 French speakers who were asked to express the locations of 28 objects in two spatial scenes. On the basis of our results we argue that a functional, as opposed to a grammatical, approach to the segmentation and analysis of these sorts of expressions is crucial. Such an approach reflects the fact that different Figures (i.e. objects to be located) can exist simultaneously across speech and gesture. Using filmed examples from our data set, we propose a new definition of static locative expressions and outline a multimodal approach for their analysis in oral discourse.

Interfacing language, spatial perception and cognition in Type Theory with Records

“…In the latter case humans programme the robot through language (Lauria et al 2002). Cross-disciplinary research has shown that spatial language is dependent on several contextual factors that are part of an agent's interaction with the environment through perception and other agents through dialogue, for example geometrical arrangement of the scene (Regier and Carlson 2001), the type of objects referred to and their interaction (Coventry et al 2001;Dobnik andKelleher 2013, 2014), visual and discourse salience of objects (Kelleher et al 2005), alignment in dialogue (Watson et al 2004;, and gesture (Tutton 2013) among others.…”