Is the Mano a Tulipano gesture compatible with canonical questions? An empirical study of a speech act marking gesture

Abstract

In this paper, we present two experimental studies on the co-speech Mano a Tulipano (MAT), a gesture that is extensively used by native speakers of Italian and that typically accompanies interrogative speech acts. While there is broad consensus, in both the descriptive and the more formal literature, that MAT has a question meaning, there is no consensus on what kind of question is conveyed or marked by this gesture. Some researchers argue that co-speech MAT is ambiguous and can occur with both canonical and non-canonical questions. Other researchers have argued that MAT is presuppositional in nature and is only compatible with non-canonical questions. To test the hypothesis that MAT is fully compatible with non- canonical questions only, we conducted two acceptability judgment studies in which the participants’ task was to evaluate the appropriateness of the MAT gesture associated to two types of questions: a canonical question (i.e., a context in which, according to the presuppositional account of MAT, the presupposition is not satisfied), and a non-canonical (biased) question. We ran a binary forced-choice sentence evaluation task (Study 1) and a gradient acceptability judgment study (Study 2) to test if and at which rate Italian participants accepted the MAT gesture accompanying canonical questions. Our results show that MAT is fully acceptable only when the presupposition that the question is non-canonical is satisfied, compatibly with the presuppositional account. When this presupposition is not supported by the context, judgments on MAT were more variable across participants when a binary judgment was requested (Study 1); moreover, MAT received intermediate ratings by all the participants when a gradient judgment was required (Study 2).