Craig Sailor
FishFeed 28/02/20
Abstract
Co-speech gestures (CSGs) are gestures which co-occur with a spoken expression and contribute some additional information about its denotation. Until very recently, the literature has assumed that their gestural modality gives CSGs a special semantic status: roughly, they are either always interpreted as supplements, akin to appositives (Ebert 2014), or as cosuppositions, akin to truth-conditionally vacuous modifiers (Schlenker 2018, et seq.). By contrast, Esipova (2018, et seq.) develops what she calls a compositionally-driven approach: modifier CSGs behave strictly like their spoken counterparts; their interpretation depends only on how they compose, not on some intrinsic property associated with their modality. Depending entirely on their context, then, CSGs can be interpreted as supplements, non-restricting modifiers, or even restricting modifiers. This is summed up in what we can call Esipova’s Conjecture: syntax and semantics are modality-blind. This predicts that CSGs should behave like their spoken counterparts with respect to phenomena that are sensitive to the at-issue / non-at-issue divide (i.e. whether a piece of content makes a truth-conditional contribution). Ellipsis is just such a phenomenon. In this talk, I show that the ellipsis recovery procedure is able to freely ignore most truth-conditionally vacuous content, while at-issue content is recovered obligatorily. Crucially, this holds regardless of whether the antecedent material is spoken or gestural: what matters is how such material composes, consistent with Esipova’s Conjecture. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the identity condition on ellipsis. (This is based on joint work with Valentina Colasanti, TCD.)
