Semantics of Gesture

Abstract

Current formal semantic theories aim at capturing gestural semantic contributions and in particular their interplay with the semantics that stems from cooccurring speech. To grasp how gesture contributes meaning and interacts with speech, the information status of gesture is of prime importance. This article gives an overview of the different conceptions of the information status of gestures that have been put forth and discusses the empirical predictions and theoretical consequences that arise from the respective theories. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 10 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Co-Speech Gestures in Enhancing Engineering Proposal Presentations: A Multimodal Analysis of ESP Spoken Discourse

“…As a communicative mode, co-speech gestures offer visual signals within their linguistic structure (Ebert, 2024;Fricke, 2013;Landau, 2016;Pouw et al, 2021;Schlenker, 2018Schlenker, , 2020. These visual signals are organized within the language system, particularly in two main areas: reference (e.g., Fricke, 2013;Landau, 2016) and semantics (e.g., Ebert, 2024;Pouw et al, 2021;Schlenker, 2018Schlenker, , 2020. Cospeech gestures provide visual signals to reference specific entities and objects, allowing speakers to indicate and point to, or visually represent objects discussed (Landau, 2016).…”