I recently completed a manuscript titled “Anaphoric demonstratives occur with fewer and different pointing gestures than deictic demonstratives.” This manuscript is currently under review.

The abstract is:

Speakers often produce demonstratives, such as this/that and here/there, together with pointing gestures. However, little is known about what leads speakers to produce some demonstrative tokens with points, and others without them. We examine 724 demonstrative references made by speakers of Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language, in a corpus of landscape description interviews. Our analysis assessed the effects of demonstrative phoricity (deictic vs. anaphoric) and information status (mentioned vs. new) on the co-organization of demonstratives and pointing. We found that both demonstrative phoricity and information status affected Ticuna speakers’ gesture rate: references with deictic demonstratives and discourse-new references were more likely to co-occur with points. Both phoricity and information status also affected articulatory properties of the gestures, such as handshape and elbow extension. Together, these findings show that both language-specific factors, such as demonstrative phoricity, and universal ones, such as information status, influence the co-organization of demonstratives and pointing.

Download a preprint of this manuscript.

November 2020: Manuscript on Co-Speech Gesture / Dr. Amalia Skilton - Chancellor's Fellow by is licensed under a