Cover not available
Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022
Edited by Jorrig Vogels and Sterre Leufkens
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 39] 2022
► pp. 225–239

Integrating deictic co-speech gestures in demonstrative forms

| Utrecht University

Deictic co-speech gestures (DCSGs) are commonly regarded as intimately related to exophoric demonstrative forms; yet, no account is available that formalises this relation. This paper proposes that DCSGs spell-out part of the internal structure of exophoric demonstratives: concretely, they contribute the spatial coordinates (direction and distance, syntactically encoded by the Demonstrative ‘Dem’ head and by a Measure Phrase ‘MeasP’ that modifies it, respectively) that identify the location of the demonstrative’s referent and the deictic centre. This naturally captures the intuition that exophoric demonstratives and DCSGs are related, under a multi-modal spell-out approach to demonstrative forms. Further, this proposal is compatible with independent facts regarding both the grammaticalisation of demonstrative forms and their acquisition.

Keywords: demonstratives, deictic co-speech gestures, syntax, multi-modal spell-out
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Deictic co-speech gestures
  • 3.Assumptions: DemP’s internal structure
    • 3.1Person features
    • 3.2DemP’s internal structure
  • 4.Proposal: Dem + MeasP ⇔ DCSGs
  • 5.Extensions
    • 5.1DCSGs, endophoricity, and diachrony
    • 5.2DCSGs and acquisition
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 4 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00071.ter
References
Bangerter, Adrian
2004 “Using pointing and describing to achieve joint focus of attention in dialogue.” Psychological Science 15(6): 415–419. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen
2018 “Yucatec demonstratives in interaction: spontaneous vs. elicited data.” Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective ed. by Stephen C. Levinson, Sarah Cutfield, Michael J. Dunn, Nick J. Enfield and Sérgio Meira. 176–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bühler, Karl
1934 Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Fischer.Google Scholar
Bye, Patrik & Peter Svenonius
2012 “Non-concatenative morphology as an epiphenomenon.” The morphology and phonology of exponence ed. by Jochen Trommer. 427–495. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve Vivienne
1978 “From gesture to word: On the natural history of deixis in language acquisition.” Human Growth and Development ed. by Jerome Seymour Bruner and Alison Garton. 85–120. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve Vivienne & C. J. Sengul
1978 “Strategies in the acquisition of deixis”. Journal of Child Language 5(3): 457–475. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooperrider, Kensy
2021 “Fifteen ways of looking at a pointing gesture.” Unpublished manuscript. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooperrider, Kensy, Jordan Fenlon, Jonathan Keane, Diane Brentari & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2021 “How pointing is integrated into language: Evidence from speakers and signers.” Frontiers in Communication 61: 567774. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davis, Colin
2021 “The morpho-syntactic significance of the unextractability of English possessive pronouns.” Unpublished manuscript. [URL]
Diessel, Holger
1999 Demonstratives: Form, Function, and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 “Demonstratives, joint attention, and the emergence of grammar.” Cognitive Linguistics 17(4): 463–489. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 “Distance contrasts in demonstratives.” The World Atlas of Language Structures Online ed. by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [URL]
Diessel, Holger & Kenny R. Coventry
2020 “Demonstratives in spatial language and social interaction: An interdisciplinary review.” Frontiers in Psychology 111: 555265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forker, Diana
2020 “Elevation as a grammatical and semantic category of demonstratives.” Frontiers in Psychology 111: 1712. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garciá, Juan L. P., Katrine Rosendal Ehlers & Kristian Tylén
2017 “Bodily constraints contributing to multimodal referentiality in humans: The contribution of a de-pigmented sclera to proto-declaratives.” Language & Communication 541: 73–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harbour, Daniel
2016 Impossible Persons. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herrmann, Stephanie
2018 “Warao demonstratives.” Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective ed. by Stephen C. Levinson, Sarah Cutfield, Michael J. Dunn, Nick J. Enfield and Sérgio Meira. 282–302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hinterwimmer, Stefan
2019 “How to point at discourse referents. On anaphoric uses of complex demonstratives.” Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23 1, ed. by M. Teresa Espinal, Elena Castroviejo, Manuel Leonetti, Louise McNally and Cristina Real-Puigdollers. 495–514. [URL]
Iverson, Jana M. & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2005 “Gesture paves the way for language development.” Psychological Science 16(5): 367–373. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kendon, Adam
2004 Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kita, Sotaro
2003 “Pointing: A foundational building block of human communication.” Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet ed. by Sotaro Kita. 1–8. Mahwah, NJ / London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Küntay, Aylin C. & Aslı Özyürek
2006 “Learning to use demonstratives in conversation: What do language specific strategies in Turkish reveal?” Journal of Child Language 33(2): 303–320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
2004 “Deixis.” The handbook of pragmatics, ed. by Laurence H. Horn and Gregory Ward. 97–121. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
McNeill, David
1992 Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meira, Sérgio
2018 “Tiriyó: Non-contrastive exophoric uses of demonstratives.” Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective ed. by Stephen C. Levinson, Sarah Cutfield, Michael J. Dunn, Nick J. Enfield and Sérgio Meira. 222–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mesh, Kate
2017 “Points of comparison: What indicating gestures tell us about the origins of signs in San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin.
Mesh, Kate, Emiliana Cruz, Joost van de Weijer, Niclas Burenhult & Marianne Gullberg
2021 “Effects of scale on multimodal deixis: Evidence from Quiahije Chatino.” Frontiers in Psychology 111: 584231. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ozçalişkan, Şeyda & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2005 “Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development.” Cognition 96(3): B101–B113. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peeters, David, Mingyuan Chu, Judith Holler, Peter Hagoort & Aslı Özyürek
2015 “Electrophysiological and kinematic correlates of communicative intent in the planning and production of pointing gestures and speech.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 27(12): 2352–2368. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peeters, David, Emiel Krahmer & Alfons Maes
2021 “A conceptual framework for the study of demonstrative reference.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 28(2): 409–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Craige
2002 “Demonstratives as definites.” Information sharing. Reference and presupposition in language generation and interpretation, ed. by Kees van Deemter and Rodger Kibble. 89–196. Stanford, CA: CSLI Press.Google Scholar
Schlenker, Philippe
2020 “Gestural grammar.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 381: 887–936. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Svenonius, Peter
2008 “Projections of P.” Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P ed. by Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlačil, Berit Gehrke and Rick Nouwen. 63–84. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “Spatial P in English.” Mapping Spatial PPs: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures ed. by Guglielmo Cinque and Luigi Rizzi. 127–160. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Spans and words.” Morphological metatheory ed. by Daniel Siddiqi and Heidi Harley. 201–222. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “A span is a thing: A span-based theory of words.” NELS 50: Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society ed. by Mariam Asatryan, Yixiao Song and Ayana Whitmal. 193–206. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
Tanz, Christine
1980 Studies in the acquisition of deictic terms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Terenghi, Silvia
2022 “Missing Person Structure and change in Romance demonstratives”. PhD diss., Utrecht University.
Zwarts, Joost
1997 “Vectors as relative positions: A compositional semantics of modified PPs.” Journal of Semantics 141: 57–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Ruys, E. G.
2023. Not every pronoun is always a pronoun. Linguistics and Philosophy 46:5 ► pp. 1027 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.