Der pragmatische Status ikonischer Bedeutung in sprechsprachlicher Kommunikation: Gesten, Ideophone, Prosodische Modulierungen (PSIMS)
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Summary of project: Iconic Gestures: Iconic co-speech gestures are, by default not at-issue, but can be shifted towards at-issueness when accompanied by demonstratives. - Analysis of iconic co-speech gestures as supplements. - Iconic co-speech gestures receive different interpretations depending on how they temporally occur with accompanying speech. - Post-speech gestures are predicted to be more at-issue than co-speech gestures, with them becoming more at-issue the more they are displaced from the speech. Prosodic Modulations: Letter replications in social media (e.g., looooong) are more frequent in adjectives associated with greater size or spatial/temporal extent. - Social media corpora are an excellent testbed for iconic prosody as they exhibit temporal features of spoken language. - An iconic relation between vertical space and pitch has been demonstrated in various disciplines (higher in space = higher pitch). - Testing the physiological origin of the effect in head motion shows inconclusive results; therefore, we suggest that the physiological origin has been conceptualized and is now sensory. Ideophones: Sentence-medial adverbial ideophones are, by default, not at-issue and can also be analysed as supplements. - Sentence-medial adverbial ideophones accompanied by demonstratives are predicted to be more at-issue, similarly to iconic co-speech gestures. - Predicative ideophones appear to be at-issue due to their necessity for the integrity of the sentence. - Ideophones in German are frequent in children’s books; especially at a younger age (up to 6 years). They do only partially follow the implicational hierarchy proposed by Dingemanse (2012) and they can also be multisensory in contrast to what has been proposed earlier. Iconicity and the evolution of language: Novel iconic vocalizations covering a myriad of concepts are understood well-above chance across disparate languages and cultures, which has implications for language evolution and is interpreted in line with the idea that language evolved multimodally, with visual gestures and acoustic sounds. Sound symbolism: Sound symbolism is present in the names of German Pokémon. However, the same concepts may be sound-symbolically expressed in various ways across languages. We propose that the expression largely depends on the phonological and phonotactic structure of a given language. Graient nature of at-issueness: At-issueness appears to be gradient rather than binary and differing factors can impact whether an iconic enrichment is part of the asserted meaning of an utterance or not. - Based on the apparent gradient nature of at-issue, we propose a scale indicating the at-issue status of iconic enrichments according to these varying factors.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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2018. A comparison of sign language with speech plus gesture. Theoretical Linguistics 44(3–4). 239–249
Ebert, Cornelia
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2019. Antonym adjective pairs and prosodic iconicity: Evidence from letter replications in an English blogger corpus. Linguistics Vanguard 5(1)
Fuchs, Susanne, Egor Savin, Stephanie Solt, Cornelia Ebert & Manfred Krifka
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2021. Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures. Scientific Reports, 11(1)
Ćwiek, Aleksandra, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, Eva Liina Asu, Dan Dediu, Katri Hiovain, … Marcus Perlman
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2021. On the interaction of gestural and linguistic perspective taking. Frontiers in Communication
Hinterwimmer, Stefan, Umesh Patil & Cornelia Ebert
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2022. The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377(1841), 20200390
Ćwiek, Aleksandra, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, Eva Liina Asu, Dan Dediu, Katri Hiovain, … Bodo Winter
