The role of gesture in ʔayʔaǰuθəm determiners and demonstratives

Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of co-speech gesture with determiners and demonstratives in ʔayʔaǰuθəm (ISO 639-3: coo), an endangered Salish language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. Using a small experiment designed after similar work by Ebert et al. (2020) on German, we show that gestural content is not-at-issue accompanying ʔayʔaǰuθəm determiners but shifts to the at-issue dimension with at least one class of demonstratives, the so-called “gesture demonstratives”. The experiment also confirms Ebert et al.’s observation that co-speech gesture makes different contributions with indefinite-like versus definite-like determiners. Overall, the findings suggest that speech-accompanying gestures are interpreted similarly even in unrelated languages with quite different systems of determiners and demonstratives.