Relating gesture to speech: reflections on the role of conditional presuppositions

Linguistics and Philosophy 42 (4):317-332 (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In his paper ‘Gesture Projection and Cosuppositions,’ Philippe Schlenker argues that co-verbal gestures convey not at-issue content by default and in particular, that they trigger conditional presuppositions. In this commentary, I take issue with both of these claims. Conditional presuppositions do not supply a systematic means for capturing the semantic contribution of a co-verbal gesture. Some gestures appear to contribute content inside of a negation when their associated speech content is likewise embedded; in other cases, co-verbal gestures arguably contribute unconditional content to the global level. When this happens, we can infer what might look like a conditional presupposition, but this inference follows naturally from general principles already at work in purely verbal discourse and does not justify the claim that gesture content is contributed to a conditional presupposition. Problems exposed in the discussion of conditional presuppositions show that we are not yet in a position to make a general claim about the at-issue status of co-verbal gestures.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,449

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Gesture projection and cosuppositions.Philippe Schlenker - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (3):295-365.
Conversational coherence and gesture.Kawai Chui - 2009 - Discourse Studies 11 (6):661-680.
Presuppositions and Antipresuppositions in Conditionals.Brian Leahy - 2011 - Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory:257-274.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-12-19

Downloads
32 (#741,023)

6 months
4 (#864,415)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?