Time: 11-12.30, Tuesday 12th November
Place: B21 7 George Square

Semantic structure and emerging conventions in silent gesture

Marieke Schouwstra

When individuals do not share a common language, they cannot reliably use existing linguistic conventions when they communicate. This is is the case in, e.g., unsupervised second language acquisition and home sign. I will briefly review observations from these systems, showing that they are largely governed by semantic organisational principles (Jackendoff, 2002).

Subsequently, I will present results from my silent gesture experiments, in which naive participants were asked to describe events using only gesture and no speech (similarly to Goldin-Meadow et al., 2008). I will show that, like unsupervised second language learners and homesigners, silent gesturers shape utterances flexibly and according to their meaning:

– Whereas for simple events that involve motion through space (e.g., ‘pirate smashes guitar’), SOV basic word order is preferred, more abstract intensional events (e.g., ‘pirate searches guitar’) give rise to a different ordering: SVO.

– When participants are asked to describe events that take place at some other time than now (e.g., ‘a pirate smashes a guitar at three o’clock’), they systematically apply a strategy similar to that observed in adult second language learners and homesigners, in which the temporal information precedes—and never interrupts—the event information (such as in ‘3 O’CLOCK-PIRATE-GUITAR-THROW’). This mirrors the semantic representation of a temporally displaced event.

These observations strengthen the hypothesis that in language systems without full syntax, meaning determines structure, suggesting an evolutionary scenario in which semantic structure preceded syntactic structure. However, how and why have these early semantic stages of language evolved such that the relationship between utterance structure and semantic structure became obscured? In other words, how did language go from semantic organising principles to fully functioning syntactic rules? I will conclude with some ideas how to investigate this question empirically, using various silent gesture lab experiments that incorporate repeated social transmission.

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