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Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negation in French and Its Organisation with Speech

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Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

Part of the book series: Language, Cognition, and Mind ((LCAM,volume 1))

Abstract

In this paper, we present novel observations indicating that the syntax of clause negation in French constrains how speakers perform a specific gestural form associated with negation. As previously demonstrated for English (Harrison 2010), the Palm-Down-Horizontal-Across (PDA) gesture that we study tends to be coordinated with the main propositional negator and then held in space with the proceeding clause-mate elements. This tendency is confirmed by the French data from an audiovisual corpus of naturalistic conversations. These new data show that the PDA gesture stroke starts with the vocal marker of negation in French as well. This invites further investigation into the relation between propositional structure and structural aspects of gestures as a full component of linguistic organisation.

This paper was improved thanks to constructive observations arising from presentations at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon in June 2013, at the 4th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies in Frankfurt/Oder in July 2010, at the SNUGLS meeting in Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle in June 2010, and with different cohorts of graduate and undergraduate students. We express our gratitude to them, as well as to the anonymous referees of this volume, noting the application of the usual disclaimers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To clarify, the claim that gestures are part of linguistic organisation because they are constrained by verbal signs does not imply that the gesture we study is necessary for the expression of clausal negation. Indeed, the PDA seems to facilitate interpretation rather than trigger it, in the way that non-manual signs do compared to manual ones (see Pfau 2016 this volume). Facilitating interpretation is of course what procedural expressions do, as opposed to conceptual ones (see contributions to Escandell-Vidal et al. 2011). While the claim by one anonymous reviewer that conceptual content is not communicated by gestures is incaccurate (we cite Kendon 1988; Jouitteau 2004; de Brabanter 2007; and McNeill 2005 as illustrating that gestures can communicate specific conceptual contents), it is probably fair to say that some gestures are primarily procedural, justifying a parallel with intonation. The optionality of gestures does not absolve the linguist from accounting for them however.

  2. 2.

    An anonymous reviewer correctly points out that the logical scope of negation is not necessarily sensitive to the respective surface position of items. The universal quantifier in All is not lost is in the scope of the subsequent clausal negative that focuses on it. Sensitivity to surface position is captured by the structural notion of immediate scope, that differentiates He didn’t see anyone and ?* Anyone didn’t see him, as well as The committee didn’t shortlist only 2 candidates and Only 2 candidates weren’t shortlisted by the committee. It is in this sense of Immediate Scope that the term “scope” is used in this paper.

  3. 3.

    ELAN annotation software is the Eudico Linguistic Annotator developed at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo, 315100, China

    Simon Harrison

  2. Département des Sciences du Langage, CRISCO (EA4255), Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Esplanade de la Paix, CS 14032, 14032, Caen CEDEX 5, France

    Pierre Larrivée

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  1. Département des Sciences du Langage, University of Caen Lower Normandy, Caen, France

    Pierre Larrivée

  2. #308 Bldg 150, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Chungmin Lee

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Harrison, S., Larrivée, P. (2016). Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negation in French and Its Organisation with Speech. In: Larrivée, P., Lee, C. (eds) Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_4

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