The seminar is held in hybrid format, in person (Múzeum krt. 4/i Room 224) and online. To join online click the following Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/889933315?pwd=Q3U3V3VQdXpXckhJYWRrcWRiMUhhQT09 ________________________________________________________

April 21 (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE

Angelika Kiss

Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto

Structural iconicity predicts word order in improvised gestures

Although the world’s languages vary in terms of the order of the Subject, Verb, and Object, the observation that most languages have either SOV or SVO order (Dryer 2013) has led to hypotheses that they reflect some "default" cognitive representation of event structure. One way of getting insight into this default representation is to expose participants to non-linguistic depictions of events and ask them to communicate what they think they saw using improvised gesture/pantomim (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Using silent gestures allows for non-linguistic communication, thereby revealing how events (i.e., verb) and their participants (i.e., arguments) are linearized without the word order restrictions of the speaker’s first language; it is proposed that such gestures reflect an earlier stage along the pathway of language evolution to the present day (Tomasello 2008). While Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) observed that transitive events (e.g., captain swings pail) are predominantly gestured with an SOV order, regardless of the participant's first language, it has also been observed later that transitive verbs of creation (e.g., wizard creates basketball, octopus paints feather), are gestured with an SVO order. There are two explanations offered for this tendency. On the one hand, Schouwstra & De Swart (2014) explain this by intensionality. Intensional verbs (including verbs of creation which the authors believe are intensional) all prefer an SVO order in their study, so intensionality must be the property that triggers the postverbal position of the object, because such objects contribute their intension, not their extension, and so they are "more dependent" on the verb. On the other hand, Christensen et al. (2016), who got the same result for verbs of creation, explain it by what they refer to as "structural iconicity". Namely, the object of verbs of creation follow the verb because they start existing after the event, and so improvised gestures are iconic in the sense that the structure of the gestured string is sensitive to the timeline of subevents within an event. Our study uses the same silent gesture paradigm, and we test the two explanations by eliciting intransitive events under two conditions: with a preexisting subject (e.g., feather falls out, UFO disappears), and with a created subject (e.g., a feather grows out, a UFO appears). If there is no difference in the gestured order of the Subject and Object, it supports the intensionaity hypothesis, because subjects of lexical verbs can never be intensional. However, if participants do distinguish the two kinds of events in a way that created subjects follow the verb of creation, it supports the structural iconicity hypothesis. Our results for transitive verbs replicate previous findings, that is, preexisting objects are gestured in a preverbal position (OV), and created objects, in a postverbal one (VO). Crucially, we found the same tendency for subjects as well, that is, preexisting subjects are gestured in a preverbal position (SV), and created ones, in a postverbal position (VS). Building on the observations of Forbes (2020) and Den Dikken et al. (2018), I show how the structural iconicity hypothesis can also account for the postverbal position of intensional verbs in improvised gestures. References Christensen et al. (2016). Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems. Cognition. Den Dikken et al. (2018). Intensional transitive verbs and abstract clausal complemen-tation. In Non-propositional intentionality, OUP.  Dryer (2013). WALS. Forbes (2020). Intensional transitive verbs. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008). The natural order of events. PNAS. Schouwstra & de Swart. (2014). The semantic origins of word order. Cognition. Tomasello (2008). Origins of human communication. MIT Press.