Abstract
In his paper ‘Gesture Projection and Cosuppositions,’ Philippe Schlenker argues that co-verbal gestures convey not at-issue content by default and in particular, that they trigger conditional presuppositions. In this commentary, I take issue with both of these claims. Conditional presuppositions do not supply a systematic means for capturing the semantic contribution of a co-verbal gesture. Some gestures appear to contribute content inside of a negation when their associated speech content is likewise embedded; in other cases, co-verbal gestures arguably contribute unconditional content to the global level. When this happens, we can infer what might look like a conditional presupposition, but this inference follows naturally from general principles already at work in purely verbal discourse and does not justify the claim that gesture content is contributed to a conditional presupposition. Problems exposed in the discussion of conditional presuppositions show that we are not yet in a position to make a general claim about the at-issue status of co-verbal gestures.
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Juan de la Cierva fellowship IJCI-2014-22059, funded by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria, y Competitividad, Spain.
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I gratefully acknowledge support from Juan de la Cierva fellowship IJCI-2014-22059. I would also like to thank Nicholas Asher, David Beaver, Alex Lascarides, Cynthia Matuszek, Kate Thompson, and the students of the ESSLLI 2017 course on Situated Discourse for helpful discussion. Finally, I thank the reviewers and editor of Linguistcs & Philosophy for their constructive feedback.
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Hunter, J. Relating gesture to speech: reflections on the role of conditional presuppositions. Linguist and Philos 42, 317–332 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9244-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9244-0