Striking similarities across ape gestural repertoires suggest shared phylogenetic origins that likely provided a foundation for the emergence of language. We pilot a novel approach for exploring ...possible semantic universals across human and nonhuman ape species. In a forced‐choice task, n = 300 participants watched 10 chimpanzee gesture forms performed by a human and chose from responses that paralleled inferred meanings for chimpanzee gestures. Participants agreed on a single meaning for nine gesture forms; in six of these the agreed form‐meaning pair response(s) matched those established for chimpanzees. Such shared understanding suggests apes' (including humans') gesturing shares deep evolutionary origins.
The interplay between the interpretation of pronouns (e.g. bound/referential) and their form (e.g. null/overt) is still ill-understood. This volume has a cross-linguistic orientation with in-depth ...investigations of more than 10 different languages. It unites researchers from the linguistic subfields of syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics, thus furthering dialogue with the goal of shedding new light on the form/interpretation connection.
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.
Revisiting Pronominal Typology Patel-Grosz, Pritty; Grosz, Patrick G.
Linguistic inquiry,
04/2017, Volume:
48, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The overarching goal of this article is to shed new light on the debate over whether pronouns (she/he/it) generally have the syntax and semantics of definite descriptions (the woman/the man/the ...thing) or that of individual variables. As a case study, we investigate the differences between personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns in German. We argue that the two types of pronouns have the same core makeup (both contain a null NP and a definite determiner), but demonstrative pronouns have additional functional structure that personal pronouns lack. This analysis is shown to derive both their commonalities and their differences, and it derives the distribution of demonstrative vs.personal pronouns by means of structural economy constraints.
Steps towards a Semantics of Dance Patel-Grosz, Pritty; Grosz, Patrick Georg; Kelkar, Tejaswinee ...
Journal of semantics,
10/2022, Volume:
39, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g., to the syntax and semantics of ...music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Schlenker 2017a; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this paper, we approach this goal by looking at narrative dance in the form of Bharatanatyam. We argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative proposed by Abusch (2013, 2014, 2021). A central conclusion is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative and music, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers (see, e.g., Schlenker 2020) in that it uses space to track individuals in a narrative and performatively portray the actions of those individuals. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions corroborate the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language (see Patel-Grosz et al. forthcoming) can yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it avails.
Constraints on Donkey Pronouns Grosz, Patrick G.; Patel-Grosz, Pritty; Fedorenko, Evelina ...
Journal of semantics,
11/2015, Volume:
32, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article reports on an experimental study of donkey pronouns, pronouns (e.g. it) whose meaning covaries with that of a non-pronominal noun phrase (e.g. a donkey) even though they are not in a ...structural relationship that is suitable for quantifier-variable binding. We investigate three constraints, (i) the preference for the presence of an overt NP antecedent that is not part of another word, (ii) the salience of the position of an antecedent that is part of another word, and (iii) the uniqueness of an intended antecedent (in terms of world knowledge). We compare constructions in which intended antecedents occur in a context such as who owns an N / who is an N-owner with constructions of the type who was without an N / who was N-less. Our findings corroborate the existence of the overt NP antecedent constraint, and also show that the salience of an unsuitable antecedent’s position matters. Furthermore, our findings show that uniqueness only matters in the N-less type construction and not in the N-owner type construction; we conclude that this supports a potential approach in terms of dynamic semantics over a competing e-type approach.
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