Dr. Marianne Huijsmans

ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Comox-Sliammon) demonstratives and determiners and the role of co-speech gesture

In this talk based on joint work with Daniel Reisinger (UBC) and Lisa Matthewson (UBC), I introduce the demonstrative and determiner paradigms in ʔayʔaǰuθəm (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon), a Central Salish language, and discuss how they interact with co-speech gesture. I show that ʔayʔaǰuθəm determiners and demonstratives encode evidentiality, while demonstratives also encode deictic distance. I then discuss the role of co-speech pointing and iconic gestures accompanying these D-elements, presenting a mini-experiment based on Ebert et al. (2020). In this mini-experiment, we investigate the type of content contributed by co-speech gesture as well as differences in the interpretation of co-speech gesture accompanying different types of D-elements. Like Ebert et al., we find that co-speech gesture typically contributes not-at-issue, appositive-like meaning, but may contribute at-issue content when accompanying demonstratives. We also find that co-speech gesture is interpreted differently accompanying definite-like and indefinite-like DPs.