We are happy to announce a talk by Jonathan Weinrich (GU) next thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below.
Since this talk will be held online, please note that you need to register beforehand. If you didn’t do it yet, send an email to koepping@em.uni-frankfurt.de before April 22. You will receive a reply with the access data (to zoom) on thursday at 4pm (= immediately before the colloquium starts).
Title: Gestural referents as SDRT anaphora
Date: April 23rd
Time: 4pm – 6pm
Abstract:
Lascarides & Stone (2009) outline a semantic approach to interpreting gestures. They integrate the gestures into the SDRT framework of Asher & Lascarides (2003) and allow them to combine by discourse relations. This involves the usage discourse referents in a DRT-like fashion.
While they do not explicitly advocate the idea, a possible interpretation of their examples suggests that all gestural discourse referents are restricted in coreference by the same structural constraints as pronouns. As a start of my research into formal conditions on gestures, this talk examines coreference of gestural discourse referents. It will first examine shortly if speech material can in principle access referents only mentioned in gesture. The general possibility is confirmed.
Then the idea is discussed that gestural discourse referents are either (i) coreferent with a structurally accessible antecedent or (ii) use such an antecedent by bridging. This idea is rejected on basis of larger discourse examples.