Interpreting concealed questions

Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy ≈ John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, which assumes that an entity-denoting expression α may be type-shifted into an expression ?z.P(α), where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration

Biased polar question forms in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT):Two functions of headshake

We identify several polar question forms in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) through a production experiment in which we manipulate two types of biases: (i) the prior expectations of the person asking the question, and (ii) the evidence available in the immediate context of utterance. Our analysis in the present paper focuses on forms involving headshake. We find that in some cases headshake expresses negation, as expected, but in other cases it fulfils another function, namely, it is part of a sentence-final phrase either expressing uncertainty or signalling a request for a response from the addressee, or possibly both at the same time. We further observe that each question form has a distinct ‘bias profile’, indicating a certain combination of prior expectations and contextual evidence. Besides these empirical findings, our study also makes a methodological contribution: our experimental design could be used in future work to identify polar question forms with different bias profiles in sign languages other than NGT, as well as visual cues accompanying polar questions with different bias profiles in spoken languages

TrueDepth measurements of facial expressions: Sensitivity to the angle between camera and face

Facial expressions play an important role in communication, especially in sign languages. Linguistic analysis of the exact contribution of facial expressions, as well as the creation of realistic conversational avatars, especially sign language avatars, requires accurate measurements of the facial expressions of humans while engaged in linguistic interaction. Several recent projects have employed a TrueDepth camera to make such measurements. The present paper investigates how reliable this technique is. In particular, we consider the extent to which the obtained measurements are affected by the angle between the camera and the face. Overall, we find that there are generally significant, and often rather substantial differences between measurements from different angles. However, when the measured facial features are highly activated, measurements from different angles are generally strongly correlated

Exploring new methods for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing facial expressions

We explore new methods for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing facial expressions and demonstrate the utility of these methods in a case study on polar questions in Sign Language of the Netherlands