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Gesture projection and cosuppositions

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Abstract

In dynamic theories of presupposition, a trigger pp′ (e.g. it stopped raining) with presupposition p (it rained) and at-issue component p′ (it doesn’t now rain) comes with a requirement that p should be entailed by the local context of pp′. We argue that some co-speech gestures should be analyzed within a presuppositional framework, but with a twist: an expression p co-occurring with a co-speech gesture G with content g comes with the requirement that the local context of p should guarantee that p entails g; we call such assertion-dependent presuppositions ‘cosuppositions’. We show that this analysis can be combined with earlier theories of local contexts to account for complex patterns of gesture projection in quantified and in attitudinal contexts, and we compare our account to two potential alternatives: one based on supervaluations, and one, due to Cornelia Ebert, that treats co-speech gestures as supplements. We argue that the latter is correct, but for ‘post-speech’ gestures (= gestures that come after the expressions they modify), rather than for co-speech gestures.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following colleagues for discussion and objections: Amir Anvari, Diane Brentari, Emmanuel Chemla, Miloje Despić, Cornelia Ebert, Karen Emmorey, Masha Esipova, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Chris Kennedy, Manfred Krifka, Manuel Križ, Jeremy Kuhn, Salvador Mascarenhas, Rob Pasternak, Benjamin Spector, Lyn Tieu, audiences at New York University, University of Chicago, MIT, and ZAS Berlin, as well as very constructive anonymous referees for Linguistics & Philosophy. Special thanks to Rob Pasternak and to Emmanuel Chemla for discussion of most aspects of this project, to Manfred Krifka for detailed written suggestions, to Masha Esipova for pointing out passages that needed to be clarified, and to Jeremy Kuhn, Rob Pasternak and Lyn Tieu for discussion of specific examples, as well as for theoretical exchanges. This work started out as a reaction to Ebert and Ebert (2014), and Cornelia Ebert’s seminal ideas and helpful comments are gratefully acknowledged. The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2004–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 324115—FRONTSEM (PI: Schlenker). Research was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives (ENS), which is supported by Grants ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC.

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  1. Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS, UMR 8129, ENS/EHESS, PSL Research University, 75005, Paris, France

    Philippe Schlenker

  2. Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Philippe Schlenker

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Schlenker, P. Gesture projection and cosuppositions. Linguist and Philos 41, 295–365 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9225-8

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