GEHM plenary meeting

The GEHM network on Gesture and Head Movements in Language is organising a plenary meeting open to the project participants and other interested on 22 - 23 October 2020. The meeting will be held online using the zoom platform. A link will be sent to those interested in participating. Please, contact Patrizia Paggio at paggio@hum.ku.dk if you would like to attend.

Day 1: Thursday 22 October

Day 2:  Friday 23 October

Most of the programme on the second day is reserved for the project participants with the exception of the keynote speech at 12:00.

Abstract of keynote speech

The mouth shrug in Danish Sign Language

Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

In what has been described as a horseshoe-shaped mouth, the chin is raised, and the lip corners may be depressed. This mouth behaviour is seen in what Darwin (1890) described as the shoulder shrug. Darwin saw the shoulder shrug as a gesture of impotence, resignation and unwillingness. Givens (1977) describes it as including head tilt, rotated-upward palm gestures, pouting and brow raise. While many of the signals, including raised shoulder, may be motivated by a cowering posture designed to protect the body in the case of threat, Givens suggests that lip-pouting may derive from “an infantile pattern, pan-human and general among higher primates, of protruding the lips while whimpering or while reacting negatively to circumstances over which one has little or no control” (1977: 24). Debras (2017) sees what she calls the mouth shrug as “a visual modal marker of subjective disengagement” (2017: 23). In the literature on sign languages, the horseshoe-shaped mouth has been analyzed as an expression of subjective assessment and epistemic modality (Cabeza-Pereiro 2013; Cabeza-Pereiro & Iglesias-Lago 2015; Siyavoshi 2019; Martínez, Siyavoshi & S. Wilcox 2019).

In a study of expressions of epistemic modality in Danish Sign Language (DTS) dialogues, I found 88 tokens of the chin raiser in the data. Most of these occurred by themselves, with a manual sign expressing lack of knowledge or uncertainty (e.g. no-idea, doubt) or agreement (yes) or with a sign (or gesture) representing a full proposition (a pointing sign or the rotated-upward palm gesture, palm-up). The mouth shrug was used as a backchannel signal, in responses and in tags. It was accompanied by other nonmanual behaviours from the full shoulder shrug signal, especially head tilt, but also by both nodding and headshake and by sideways movements of the body or head. It was used to express both lack of knowledge, agreement and disagreement. In my talk I will give examples of these different functions and try to explain what unites them. 

Group discussions

Participants will be divided into groups depending on the topic they would like to discuss. Topics are:

• How to study information structural effects on co-speech gestures in discourse (e.g., new/given information, ‘aboutness’, topic/comment structure - prosody and prominence cross-cuts this), and how to study effects of discourse genre on co-speech gesture. (Moderator: Marianne Gullberg)
• How to model dominance in multimodal corpora. Can we do this with parallel studies on (some of) the corpora available to the network? (Moderator: Maria Koutsombogera).
• Should the network collect a corpus of online communication? Would the steering groups on zoom be a good way of doing this? If so, how shall the work be organised? (Moderator: Patrizia Paggio)