Focus Marking via Gestures

Authors

  • Cornelia Ebert
  • Stefan Evert
  • Katharina Wilmes

Abstract

This paper contributes to the recent investigations of speechaccompanyinggestures under a formal semantic view. We show that gestures can serve to disambiguate a sentence with respect to its possible focus domains. We provide a statistical evaluation of data gained from a corpus annotated with gestures and information structure. The language under investigation is German. We argue that a sentence that, in isolation, is ambiguous concerning the extension of its focus domain is disambiguated via speech-accompanying gestures. Gesture thus is a means to mark information structure next to intonation and word order.

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How to Cite

Ebert, C., Evert, S., & Wilmes, K. (2019). Focus Marking via Gestures. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 15, 193–208. Retrieved from https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/372