Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T12:10:05.669Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gesture in contexts of scopal ambiguity: Negation and quantification in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2019

Amanda Brown  and
Masaaki Kamiya
Amanda Brown*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
Masaaki Kamiya
Affiliation:
Hamilton College
*
*Corresponding author. Email: abrown08@syr.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Gestures can play a facilitative role in the interpretation of structural ambiguities (Guellaiï, Langus, & Nespor, 2014; Prieto, Borràs-Comes, Tubau, & Espinal, 2013; Tubau, González-Fuente, Prieto, & Espinal, 2015) and are associated with spoken expression of negation (Calbris, 2011; Harrison, 2014a; Kendon, 2002, 2004). This study examines gestural forms and timing patterns with specific interpretations intended by speakers in a context of negation in English where the presence of quantification (all/most/many) yields scope ambiguities, for example, All the students didn’t go = (1). Some number of the students went, but all is not the correct number (negation takes wide scope over the quantifier; not>all), versus (2) some number of the students didn’t go, and all is that number (negation takes narrow scope over the quantifier, all>not; see Horn, 2001, Jackendoff, 1972; Syrett, Simon, & Nisula, 2014b). Twenty-five native English speakers produced scopally ambiguous sentences. Analyses of 317 co-occurring gestures revealed a preponderance of head gestures and use of semantically congruent head shakes, alignment of gestures with the negator, and lengthening of gesture strokes where interpretations involved narrow-scope negation. Results are discussed with reference to scope of negation and gesture (Harrison, 2010, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) particularly in comparison to variable patterns found for prosody (Syrett, Simon, & Nisula, 2014a).

Keywords

disambiguationgesturenegationquantificationvisual prosody
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 5 , September 2019 , pp. 1141 - 1172
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baltazani, M. (2002). The prosodic structure of quantificational sentences in Greek. In Andronis, M., Debenport, E., Pycha, A., and Yoshimura, K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 63–78). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Beghelli, F., & Stowell, T. (1997). Distributivity and negation: The syntax of Each and Every. In Szabolcsi, A. (Ed.), Ways of scope taking (pp. 71–107). Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D., Abe, I., & Kanekiyo, T. (Eds.) (1965). Forms of English: Accent, morpheme, order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Borràs-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2011). “Seeing tunes”: The role of visual gestures in tune interpretation. Journal of Laboratory Phonology, 2, 355–380.Google Scholar
Calbris, G. (2011). Elements of meaning in gesture. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cirillo, R. J. (2013). On the lack of stranded negated quantifiers and inverse scope of negation in Romance. In Baauw, S., Drijkoningen, F., Meroni, L., and Pinto, M. (Eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 5] (pp. 59–74). Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Espinal, M. T., Tubau, S., Borras-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2016). Double negation in Catalan and Spanish: Interaction between syntax and prosody. In Larrivée, P., and Lee, C. (Eds.), Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives (pp. 145–176). Cham: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
González-Fuente, S., Tubau, S., Espinal, M. T., & Prieto, P. (2015). Is there a universal answering strategy for rejecting negative propositions? Typological evidence on the use of prosody and gesture. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 899.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granström, B., & House, D. (2005). Audiovisual representation of prosody in expressive speech communication. Speech Communication, 46(3–4), 393–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guellaï, B., Langus, A., & Nespor, M. (2014). Prosody in the hands of the speaker. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 700.Google ScholarPubMed
Harrison, S. (2009). Grammar, gesture, and cognition. e case of negation in English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bordeaux.Google Scholar
Harrison, S. (2010). Evidence for node and scope of negation in coverbal gesture. Gesture, 10, 29–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, S. (2013). The temporal coordination of negation gestures in relation to speech. In Proceedings of TiGeR 2013—Tilberg Gesture Research Meeting (pp. 19–21). Tilburg, Netherlands: Tilberg University Press.Google Scholar
Harrison, S. (2014a). The organisation of kinesic ensembles associated with negation. Gesture, 14, 117–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, S. (2014b). Head shakes: Variation in form, function, and cultural distribution of a head movement related to “no.” In Müller, C. M., Cienki, A., Fricke, E., Ladewig, S. H., McNeill, D., and Bressem, J. (Eds.), Body-language-communication (pp. 1496–1501). Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Harrison, S., & Larrivée, P. (2016). Morphosyntactic correlates of gestures: A gesture associated with negation in French and its organization with speech. In Larrivée, P., and Lee, C. (Eds.), Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives (pp. 75–94). Cham: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, L. R. (2001). A natural history of negation. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kadmon, N., & Roberts, C. (1986). Prosody and scope: The role of discourse structure. In Farley, A., Farley, P. and McCullough, K.-E. (Eds.), CLS 22, Part 2: Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory (pp. 16–28). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Kellerman, S. (1992). “I see what you mean”: The role of kinesic behaviour in listening and implications for foreign and second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 13, 239–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between body motion and speech: An analysis of an example. In Siegman, A. W., and Pope, B. (Eds.), Studies in dyadic communication (pp. 177–210). New York: Pergamon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendon, A. (1980). Gesticulation and speech: Two aspects of the process of utterance. In Key, M. R. (Ed.), The relationship of verbal and nonverbal communication (pp. 207–227). The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Kendon, A. (2002). Some uses of the head shake. Gesture, 2, 147–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kita, S. (Ed.) (2003). Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krahmer, E. J., & Swerts, M. (2007). The effects of visual beats on prosodic prominence: Acoustic analyses, auditory perception and visual perception. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 396–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larrivée, P. (2017). A positive polarity focus particle under negation: not also and the impact of pragmatic activation. In Ziegeler, D., and Zhiming, B. (Eds.), Negation and contact: With special focus on Singapore English (pp. 63–80). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Marsden, H. (2009). Distributive quantifier scope in English-Japanese and Korean-Japanese interlanguage. Language Acquisition, 6, 135–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What the hands reveal about thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
McNeill, D. (2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, D., Levy, E. T., & Pedelty, L. L. (1990). Speech and gesture. In Hammond, G. R. (Ed.), Cerebral control of speech and limb movements (pp. 203–256). Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Nespor, M., & Vogel, I. (2007). Prosodic phonology. Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prieto, P., Borràs-Comes, J., Tubau, S., & Espinal, M. T. (2013). Prosody and gesture constrain the interpretation of double negation. Lingua, 131, 136–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raaijmakers, J., Schrijnemakers, J., & Gremmen, F. (1999). How to deal with “the language-as-fixed-effect fallacy”: Common misconceptions and alternative solutions. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 416–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. (1984). On some gestures’ relation to talk. In Atkinson, J. M., and Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 266–296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
So, W., Demir, Ö., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). When speech is ambiguous, gesture steps in: Sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic principles in early childhood. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 209–224.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
So, W. C., Lim, J. Y., & Tan, S. H. (2014). Sensitivity to information status in discourse: Gesture precedes speech in unbalanced bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 71–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swerts, M., & Krahmer, E. J. (2005). Audiovisual prosody and feeling of knowing. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 81–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Syrett, K., Simon, G., & Nisula, K. (2014a). Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous sentences. In Huang, H.-L., Poole, E., and Rysling, A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 43 (pp. 141–152). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, Amherst Press.Google Scholar
Syrett, K., Simon, G., & Nisula, K. (2014b). Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous sentences in a discourse context. Journal of Linguistics, 50, 453–493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tottie, G., & Neukom-Hermann, A. (2010). Quantifier-negation interaction in English: A corpus linguistic study of all … not constructions. In Horn, L. R (Ed.), The expression of negation (pp. 149–185). Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tubau, S., González-Fuente, S., Prieto, P., & Espinal, M. T. (2015). Prosody and gesture in the interpretation of yes-answers to negative yes/no-questions. Linguistic Review, 32, 115–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., & Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: A professional framework for multimodality research. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1556–1559). Genoa, Italy: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar