Recovering gestured and spoken material in VP ellipsis and pro-forms

Abstract

This contribution is concerned with the at-issueness status of co-speech gestures expressing manner modification. While such gestures are typically considered to be non-at-issue, they can be made to be at-issue by the German demonstrative intensifier SO. We discuss the potential of an anaphoric relative of this intensifier, so in so do pro-forms, to shift the content of a co-speech gesture to at-issue status. We propose a formal analysis along the lines of Ebert et al., 2020, and sketch the design for an acceptability judgment experiment to test our predictions.