About the Course

Spatial Gesture Semantics

ESSLLI 2025 Advanced Course, Week 1, July 28—August 1

Visual communication means such as manual gestures interact with speech meaning. At the same time, it is well-known that gestures are sublinguistic in the sense that their contributions are neither at the at-issue nor at the non-at-issue level. The course aims to unravel this puzzle. Firstly, the sublinguistic status of gestures is captured by spatial semantics. Secondly, the course aims to explain why it is possible to talk about gestures, for instance, as part of clarification interaction. Thirdly, the preceding explanation requires a semantic framework that departs from the standard Frege/Montague models and is based on perceptual classification (with some affinity to the philosophy of Nelson Goodman).

Lectures

The slides from the individual lectures can be obtained here:

  • Lecture 1: Introduction
  • Lecture 2
  • Lecture 3
  • Lecture 4
  • Lecture 5

What to read

Useful references are:

  • Zwarts
  • Modes of representation
  • our preprints
  • mm clarification interaction?
  • ...

Contact

Andy Lücking is Privatdozent at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Alexander Henlein is PostDoc at Goethe University Frankfurt.

If you have questions, get in touch: luecking@em.uni-frankfurt.de