REaCHeS · References to Environs are Coordinated to be Heard and Seen (REaCHeS): an investigation of multimodal spatial referencing in Eastern Chatino
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-08-01 → 2021-07-31
- EU contribution
- €191,852
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
References to Environs are Coordinated to be Heard and Seen (REaCHeS): an investigation of multimodal spatial referencing in Eastern Chatino
People interact in the world, and often make an effort to draw one another’s attention to places, objects and actors within it. To draw attention toward an object or target is to indicate that target, an act that can be performed with speech (e.g.., using words like ‘this’ or ‘that’, ‘here’ or ‘there’) and with gestures (e.g., pointing with the hands and/or head). Targets can be indicated using a single strategy in isolation: a word like ‘there’ with no accompanying gesture, or a silent point, may be enough to effectively draw a person’s attention toward the target. Yet in natural discourse people are overwhelmingly likely to combine speech and gesture to indicate. It is clear that indicating is typically performed by combining speech and gesture. Yet prior research in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology has very often explored indicating as though it were performed using speech alone. The few studies that have broken this trend, and that have asked how people combine gestures and speech to indicate, have been performed in laboratory settings, where research participants were asked to point out objects in ways that did not closely mirror natural interaction. These studies were nearly always focused on English, and looked narrowly at what factors caused people to use words like ‘this’ or ‘that’ without considering the host of indicating terms (or demonstrative expressions) that exist in the world’s languages, or the many strategies for pointing that are attested the world over. As a consequence, we know very little about how indicating is performed in real-world settings, using the rich set of strategies that are available across the world’s languages and across many cultures’ conventions for gesturing. The REaCHeS project has been unique in: (1) studying the complex, multi-channel act of pointing, (2) in real-world settings, (3) with speakers of an under-documented and typologically distinctive language: Quiahije Chatino, a Zapotecan language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
To locate objects in the world, speakers typically use two linked indicating behaviours: spatial deictic expressions and pointing gestures. A growing body of research focuses on both of these indicating types, asking how semantic information is encoded in each modality, and investigating the factors that condition speakers’ use of indicating strategies in isolation and in combination. The proposed research programme will explore these questions by examining multimodal indicating behaviours in speakers of Eastern Chatino (Zapotecan, Otomanguan). The language presents an ideal system for examination because of its typologically unusual demonstrative system; its manual pointing system with distance-encoding formational distinctions; and its additional lip pointing system. The planned research programme comprises two studies that probe the semantic encodings of demonstratives and lip- and manual pointing, as well as the factors that motivate speakers to combine them. In Study 1, semistructured interviews will be performed in which speakers describe features of the landscape while walking familiar routes. Video and audio recordings of the multimodal talk in these interviews will be analysed using traditional tools of descriptive linguistics, along with a GIS tool adapted expressly for the research programme to encode the relative geospatial positions of speakers, addressees, and referents. Analysis will generate hypotheses about semantic distinctions encoded in various demonstrative and pointing forms. These, in turn, will be tested In Study 2, a more controlled quasi-experiment (a referential communication task) designed to isolate factors like distance and in/visibility of referent that are often coupled in discourse environments. The research programme is ambitious in its use of new tools to examine multimodal behaviour in a lesser-studied language. Expertise of Chatino speakers and researchers from multiple linguistic subdisciplines will inform its design.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- LUNDS UNIVERSITET · LundCoordinatorSweden
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union