Composition and projection of co-speech gestures

In this paper I argue against the common assumption in recent literature that content-bearing gestures co-occurring with speech project in a single uniform way determined by their co-speech status. Instead, I propose a composition-driven, modality-neutral approach whereby which projection mechanisms are available or enforced for a given piece of compositionally integrated content, spoken or gestural, is determined by how it composes in the syntax/semantics. I adduce experimental data supporting this view from an acceptability judgement task comparing co-nominal gestures to adnominal adjectives and appositives. More broadly, this paper establishes the need to treat gestures as bona fide linguistic objects at all levels of representation in order to understand how they contribute to the meaning of utterances as well as which aspects of grammar are modality-(in)dependent

A result on the c2c_2 invariant for powers of primes

The $c_2$ invariant is an arithmetic graph invariant related to quantum field theory. We give a relation modulo $p$ between the $c_2$ invariant at $p$ and the $c_2$ invariant at $p^s$, providing evidence for a conjecture of Schnetz. The key result is a relation modulo $p$ between certain coefficients of powers of products of particularly nice polynomials.Comment: 16 pages, edits according to referee comments including extracting the main result at the level of polynomial

What I will tell you about "matrix" wh-"exclamatives"!: supplementary files

audio and TextGrid files to accompany the paper in 'Proceedings of WCCFL 39

Composure and composition: supplementary files

files to accompany the paper 'Composure and composition

Towards a uniform super-linguistic theory of projection: supplementary files

audio and video files to accompany the paper in 'Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium

Focus on what’s not at issue: gestures, presuppositions, appositives under contrastive focus

This paper is an attempt to systematically investigate how contrastive focus interacts with various types of not-at-issue content (co-speech and post-speech gestures, lexical presuppositions, and appositives). I look, in particular, at when focus forces at-issue interpretations of typically not-at-issue content, when it does not, and when such at-issue interpretations are impossible even to satisfy focus-related requirements. I conclude that the main factors affecting how a given type of content aligns along these dimensions are its prosodic (in)dependence and level of attachment in the syntax. The two factors also interact in a non-trivial way, in particular for gestures, which I use as a basis for an analysis of gestures that does not assume that their temporal alignment directly determines their semantics (contra Ebert and Ebert, 2014; Ebert, 2017; Schlenker, 2018), but instead relies on syntax/semantics and syntax/prosody interaction

Polar responses in Russian across modalities and across interfaces: supplementary files

sound files, TextGrid files, pitch contour drawings, and video files to accompany the paper in 'Proceedings of FASL 28

Acceptability of at-issue co-speech gestures under contrastive focus

The status of content-bearing co-speech gestures, i.e., gestural adjuncts co-occurring with the verbal expressions they adjoin to, has recently become a matter of debate in formal semantics and pragmatics (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Ebert 2017; Tieu et al. 2017; 2018; Esipova 2018; Schlenker 2018; Zlogar & Davidson 2018). The general tendency has been to claim that co-speech gestures by default make not-at-issue contributions, however, the existing analyses differ in whether they in principle allow for at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures and, if yes, in how much cost such at-issue interpretations can incur. In this study I use an acceptability judgement task to investigate the acceptability of at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures forced by contrastive focus, as well as some factors that can potentially affect that acceptability. I conclude that while the overall results are in principle compatible with any analysis that posits a (strong) bias against at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures, further inspection of individual variation in judgement patterns allows us to argue against analyses in which the level of such bias is fixed across speakers. In particular, the variation data can be taken as evidence against the analysis of co-speech gestures as Pottsian (2005) supplements akin to appositives (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Ebert 2017). As for the factors that can potentially affect the acceptability of at-issue interpretations of co-speech gestures under contrastive focus, neither the type of content encoded by the gesture, nor emphatic production of co-speech gestures have been found to have an effect