Gestural Cosuppositions within the Transparency Theory

Abstract

It has been argued that the sentence None of these 10 guys LIFT_helped his son (where LIFT is a lifting gesture co-occurring with the verb) triggers a presupposition that for each of these 10 guys, if he had helped his son, lifting would have been involved (Schlenker 2015, 2017, 2018). We argue that the conditional nature of this presupposition might be derived within an extension of the Transparency Theory (Schlenker 2008), one in which the target sentence competes with an articulated competitor of the form: None of these 10 guys helped his son like LIFT_this. 1 New debates on co-speech gesture semantics Following initial formal work on the semantic integration of gestures in discourse (e.g. Lascarides and Stone 2009), and on iconic aspects of gestural semantics (Giorgolo 2010), there has recently been a resurgence of interest in the formal and experimental semantics of co-speech gestures. It was motivated on three fronts: co-speech gestures have become crucial to understand whether spoken language has similar means of iconic enrichment as sign language (Goldin-Meadow and Brentari 2017); co-speech gestures have become the topic of new debates in theoretical semantics, pertaining to their proper place in the inferential typology (Ebert and Ebert 2014, Schlenker 2018); and experiments have been conducted to try to adjudicate these new debates (e.g. Tieu et al. 2017, 2018). First, co-speech gestures became crucial to conduct a proper comparison between the semantics of signed and spoken languages. Iconic modulations (i.e. modifications of a lexical sign to represent aspects of the denoted object or events) are a notoriously fertile means of semantic enrichment in sign language, but they are more impoverished in spoken language. For instance, in ASL (American Sign Language) the movement of the hands realizing verb GROW can be made faster or broader to denote a growth process that is quicker or of greater amplitude (Schlenker et al. 2013). In English, the vowel of the adjective long can be modulated to refer to a very long process (Okrent 2002), as in The talk was looong (see also Fuchs et al. 2018). But it is clear that intrinsic limits of vocal iconicity make this a relatively circumscribed process. By contrast, co-speech gestures afford a fertile means of iconic enrichment of speech, one which is prima facie comparable to iconicity in sign. This motivated Goldin-Meadow and Brentari s (2017) intimation that sign with iconicity should be compared to speech with co-speech gestures rather than to speech alone. The question, however, is whether iconic modulations in sign are genuinely similar to iconic enrichments of speech by way of co-speech gestures. With respect to the iconic information which is conveyed, the similarity might be real. But on another front, results from the recent literature on signs and gestures highlights an important difference: Schlenker 2017 argues that iconic modulations (i.e. the modification of a sign or word rather than its enrichment by an external addition) can often make an atissue contribution. Thus the sentence If the talk is loooong, I ll leave before the end can be understood to make the same kind of (at-issue) claim as: If the talk is very long, I ll