Throw

Abstract

This paper provides a detailed description of the distribution of an utterance-accompanying or utterance-replacing throwing away gesture (see Bressem & Müller 2014, 2017), THROW, and proposes a formal analysis of its contribution. We argue that this gesture conveys dismissal, which we model as the marking of the question addressed by a preceding discourse move as unimportant. This work extends the growing body of linguistic work on formal gesture semantics to discourse-management gestures; moreover, we find that the dismissal meaning encoded by THROW is unlike other discourse-management operators in being unable to operate on propositional content that it accompanies.