Horizon 2020 (2014 - 2020)

Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints: GeMeTIC

Last update: Apr 19, 2021 Last update: Apr 19, 2021

Details

Locations:Norway
Start Date:Sep 1, 2020
End Date:Aug 31, 2022
Contract value: EUR 202,158
Sectors:Culture
Culture
Categories:Grants
Date posted:Apr 19, 2021

Associated funding

Associated experts

Description

Programme(s): H2020-EU.1.3.2. - Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility

Topic(s): MSCA-IF-2019 - Individual Fellowships

Call for proposal: H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

Funding Scheme: MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

Grant agreement ID: 891493

Project description:

Constraints on gestural meanings

Gestures are movements of the hands, face, or other parts of the body that can be used to communicate information, alongside or in place of speech. The EU-funded GeMeTIC project, which stands for "Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints", aims to explore how gestures contribute to the meaning of spoken utterances. The project will specifically focus on the understudied problem of how the form and meaning of gestures are constrained at various levels of linguistic representation and interfaces between those levels. The theoretical component of the project will bring together two major lines of research in formal linguistics: semantics of gestures and semantics of not-at-issue expressions.

Objective:

"The proposed project 'Gestural Meanings: Typology and Interface Constraints' (GeMeTIC) will investigate how gestures, i.e., hand/body movements and facial expressions, contribute to the meaning of spoken utterances. This question has recently gained substantial traction in formal semantics and pragmatics, but to fully address it, however, one needs to understand how the general potential of gestures to encode meaning is further constrained at various levels of linguistic representation (pragmatics, compositional semantics, syntax, linearization, prosody, articulation) and interfaces between those levels---an issue that still lacks a comprehensive investigation. GeMeTIC will address this gap by comparing the behavior of gestures that contribute ""not-at-issue"" content, i.e., secondary content added on top of the main message of the utterance, to spoken expressions with similar semantics along a range of dimensions: (i) behavior of not-at-issue gestures and spoken expressions under ellipsis and in attitude reports; (ii) behavior of indexicals (i.e., context-sensitive expressions such as 'I', 'here', and 'now') in the scope of quotative gestures and spoken expressions; (iii) non-compositional interpretations (i.e., interpretations that don't match the syntactic structure of the utterance) of expressive gestures and spoken expressions. The ultimate goal of GeMeTIC will be to build a cross-modal typology of not-at-issue meanings that specifies interface constraints on how different meaning types can be encoded in speech and gesture. To accomplish its empirical goals, GeMeTIC will rely on introspective judgements from individual speakers, corpus data, and quantitative data from experiments conducted online. The theoretical component of the project will bring together two major lines of research in formal linguistics: semantics of gestures and semantics of not-at-issue expressions."

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