Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negation in French and Its Organisation with Speech

Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

“…This study illustrates David McNeill's work (1992) in which he argues that gesture and speech have a common origin in the mind of the speaker and develop together as integrated but complementary meaning-making resources. Our analysis of a longitudinal dataset also corroborates a growing number of studies which have established the fact that gestures, speech, the context and the organisation of the participants in the interaction framework are all interdependent and should not be analysed separately because each individual sign contributes to highlight the speaker's cognitive process at work (Goodwin 2000(Goodwin , 2003(Goodwin , 2007Harrison and Larrivée 2016). Analysing child data also represents a relevant field of study to determine whether gestures should be considered linguistic signs or not.…”

Gesture in contexts of scopal ambiguity: Negation and quantification in English

“…A review of the literature pertinent to this study supports the existence of relationships between the expression of negation in speech and the articulatory and functional properties of gesture such that Open Hand Prone gestures and Head Shakes are commonly produced simultaneously with words such as no, not, and nothing and can serve emblematically in place of speech (Calbris, 2011;Harrison, 2009Harrison, , 2010Harrison, , 2013Harrison, , 2014aHarrison, , 2014bHarrison & Larrivée, 2016;Kendon, 2002Kendon, , 2004. In addition, work on language production, though generally from relatively few participants for the purpose of creating stimulus materials for comprehension tests, has described gesture patterns associated with specific readings in contexts of structural or semantic/pragmatic ambiguity (Prieto et al, 2013;Tubau et al, 2015), as well as gesture strategies that are universal even in the context of lexicosyntactic and prosodic differences across languages (González-Fuente et al, 2015).…”

“…However, this is not what we observe, as 66% of head shakes aligned with all in not>all sentences. These results could imply that the relationship between node/scope of negation and gesture phrase may be attenuated in the case of scopally ambiguous sentences involving negation, specifically that in contexts of wide-scope negation, head shakes may begin somewhere other than the negator, including earlier, though the same might not be true of other semantically oriented gestures of negation (e.g., Open Hand Prone gestures; see Harrison & Larrivée, 2016).…”

“…Open Hand Prone gestures comprise an open hand and a prone forearm, which can be moved vertically and horizontally, with the palm orientation up or down (Harrison, 2014b;Kendon, 2004). In such gestures, the preparation stage is particularly important as it enables speakers to begin and align their gesture with the negative particle and other elements associated with negation in speech (Harrison, 2013(Harrison, , 2014a, as demonstrated by the onset of such gestures with ne in the French ne : : : pas construction (Harrison & Larrivée, 2016). The gestures are often then held in post-stroke holds for the duration of the "scope" of negation (see below ;Harrison, 2010Harrison, , 2013.…”

“…Further analyses should take these into consideration as additional cues might also associate with sentences involving narrow-scope negation. An examination of how relationships between gesture and scopal ambiguities involving negation play out across languages is also needed to see if the potential cues described here are universal (see González-Fuente et al, 2015;Harrison & Larrivée, 2016;also Cirillo, 2013). In addition, it would be preferable to control for the syntactic position of the quantifier, something that was not possible in this replication of Syrett et al (2014a), as well as to examine differences between many and most regarding potential for focus.…”