Towards a morphology of recurrent gestures (ToMoReG)

PI:

Silva Ladewig (University of Goettingen)

Project description:


Researchers have observed a correlation between the stabilization of co-speech gestures and the compositionality of their forms and meanings (Ladewig, 2014; Müller, 2004, 2018). While this phenomenon has been widely documented in studies on individual recurrent gestures–i.e., partly conventionalizedgestures–, it has rarely been systematically analyzed across a broader dataset encompassing different types of recurrent gestures, nor has it been thoroughly examined from a theoretical perspective.
This project addresses this gap by investigating how compositionality emerges within recurrent gestures and whether certain gestural parameters, such as movement patterns or hand shape function as stable meaning-bearing units, meaning-differentiating features, or structural elements. To achieve this, a corpus-based and experimental approach will be employed, analyzing a diverse dataset of recurrent gestures to determine how compositional structures emerge and stabilize over time. The corpus study will focus on intra-family variation (variations within a single recurrent gesture) and cross-gesture comparisons (shared parameters across different recurrent gestures). A perception experiment will complement this by testing which gestural parameters most strongly influence meaning interpretation when systematically manipulated.
By systematically investigating (a) which parameters recur within individual recurrent gestures and (b) which are shared across different recurrent gestures while maintaining the same meaning, the project will establish a repertoire of recurring form parameters. Given the unclear status of these parameters, (c) a theoretical discussion will clarify whether gestural form parameters function similarly to linguistic units such as morphemes and allomorphs or whether they follow modality-specific principles of composition.