 I'm glad that you managed to find your way to our new room for the department of seminars for the rest of the term because of exams. We'll be here from now on, and it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker for today, Lauren Gunn, who doesn't really need an introduction because she's one of our homegrown speakers if you want. Lauren's been at South since 2015 with the ELDP post-doc project and is sadly leaving us to go back to Australia to Latrobe but we're happy that she's been here for a few more months sort of doing both things at the same time. I'm really happy to be here because sadly it's not as often as you would like necessarily that you get a chance to hear your colleagues exciting research and this is things that I sort of feel that I've heard little bits of so I'm really happy to hear about the findings. So yeah, over to you Lauren. Thank you very much Hannah. Hannah and I have sent me regular writing meetings and so she's heard about this at the more painful stages of the process in the data coding and kind of preliminary writing phase so today I'm going to present something a little bit more cohesive than maybe what she's been used to hearing. Today I'm going to share with you kind of the thing that I've been working on the most continuously while here as an ELDP post-doc which is beginning to look at the gestural repertoire of Shuba speakers in narratives. If for some reason you would like the slides I don't have a printed handout but there's a link there the link will be at the end of the slides as well or just get in touch with me and I'll send them to you. So I'm going to talk about two different gestures today after a kind of brief introduction to kind of why we might care about looking at gesture in this community and in this context I'm going to look at one that's called the Rotated Palms Interrogative and one that is a gesture that's used with negation. And these two have been my focus largely because of this single example that I have here. I'm going to play the video for you and I'm not going to talk you through it at first. I'll just play it a couple of times and have a look at the movement of Pathang Maya's hands while she's telling this story. So this is a story that is in a really nicely illustrated picture book that a student in Singapore put together for me while I was a post-doc at NTU. It comes from this telling of the story and it's about this old woman who lives alone and she's just quite miserly and she gets very upset when the crows come to eat her food and she complains. And then there's a very nice kind of I guess charred and froid a moment at the end where the crows eat her food. She has no food and she dies. And then in the afterlife, because she told the crows to kind of get stuffed, they managed to reciprocate in the next life. It's a fairly, a prosaic story of I guess being a little bit nicer. But here she's complaining she has no food and as Pathang Maya is talking as the woman, you'll see she makes some gestures. Oh, except that this is going to be fun because I don't have audio. Just a moment. It's a very calculated thing to make you look at the gestures before you hear it with the speech because I know you're all fluent Shuba speakers. Let's try this again. Let that person come in. I'm not entirely convinced we're going to have sound. It's one thing I should be testing. There we go. We'll go back to the start. So this is possibly not the most exciting examples of gestures you may be expecting but we have some very small movements of the hands there but these rotations seem to be moving in two different directions and they seem to have two different functions. So we have a rotation upwards. She's asking what should I do? She says I have nothing to eat. She moves her hands back down. And so there's a kind of a question and that involves an upward movement and there's discussion of having nothing and that involves some kind of downward movement. And it was watching her tell this story and then watching her tell it many, many more times during the transcription process. I was interested in what was happening with those gestures and also in other narratives where I saw other speakers making similar hand movements and so pulling apart what is happening with those very subtle hand movements there. They're very easy to miss or not pay much attention to what they can tell us about the way speakers structure their language, what they can tell us about the relationship between gesture and speech. This is one of a couple of slides I have in this talk which I like to think of as my like performed authenticity slides. Here's some nice, some field work but it kind of gives you an idea of the context in which we film these stories. So what has happened in the Schubert documentation process and that's been a really nice process for me because it's been driven as much by the interests of what the community want to have recorded and what they're interested in documenting as their language, as it has been by my linguistic interests. And so what usually happens is that I will turn up with a camera and then we'll have a chat and we'll go visit some people. So here we have Karma and we'll see some of his recordings later on. That is actually Pasang Maya over there and our language documentation kitten which came along for this session here. So we kind of go along and there's a bit of a process of discussion. It's a live cat. It's not a dead cat which is a useful tool in recording. This is a live cat, not so useful but very cute. And so what happens is we kind of go with the camera. We kind of have a bit of a negotiation about what is to be recorded and then people share with us kind of stories or oral histories. So a lot of what you'll see today in the recordings is people either sharing folk tales or kind of personal history or history of life in this community. And that's been really nice for me. In fact, I have completely stepped aside from the filming. One of the younger guys took a real interest in it. And so I don't even perform this level of performed authenticity often in the documentation. This is the kind of background on what gesture has been studied in this area. You don't need to read any of the text because the answer is basically nothing. So Shuba is a Tabeto-Burman language, one of about 480 languages in the Tabeto-Burman family. We have almost no research into the relationship between speech and gesture in the family at all. I found an unpublished master's dissertation so I have something to put on the slide. That's great. And in terms of research into gesture in Nepal, we have very little. Again, I found a kind of one subset of one study that was in Nepal and Laos and Thailand. So this has been the kind of complete lack of literature both within the area and within the language family has been part of my primary motivation for wanting to create a better account of what people are doing with their gestures during narrative in Shuba as part of the documentation process. I think that's really important. A lot of the time people who work on gesture kind of trot out these, when people talk they do this with their hands and it means this and that is really grounded in a very limited set of studies. So this is a slightly facetious map that I've put together of languages in which we have at least one published study on the gestural repertoire of the speakers. And what we see is there is a slight gap in the literature also known as South Asia and so this study is trying to fill one tiny part of that gap. I have to say though, even compared to when I started looking at the gesture literature five or ten years ago, there are a lot more points on this map than there were. It was very, very much and it still is today focused on that continent. To give you a bit more background on to the language into the language itself, my research has been on a cluster of languages that are kind of the Yolmo languages. I did my PhD with Lumjun Yolmo speakers. They're called Kagate on the map here but the Shuba speakers I've been working with on and off for the last kind of six or seven years to document their language and the last three years we've had an opportunity to really build that documentation. Although they have a different language name and cultural group name and that name is currently in flux as well, they are linguistically related to this larger chain of languages. So at some point two to four hundred years ago people moved across the Himalaya and settled in the Malumchi and Hulumbu valleys and that is where the kind of traditional Yolmo communities are and then one to two centuries ago we had groups migrate to Lumjun to the Shuba speaking area and down to Ilam and all about the same size, one to one and a half thousand speakers in these isolated groups and they've remained isolated up until recently. I was very excited and lucky to go to Ilam as part of the documentation of Shuba. I took a couple of Shuba guys with me there and that's quite a very different landscape. It's full of tea plantations whereas Shuba speakers and other Yolmo speakers live in much more rugged mountainous rather than hilly terrain. So they all live in hills or mountains to some extent. They have been isolated, they're increasingly making intergroup links but the projects have begun to kind of document all of those. The corpus of materials that I am using for today's analysis is kind of a subset of the larger set of materials that we've built for the ELDP project and for my post-doc at NTU in Singapore before this. So we now have in the corpus actually this is a bit out of date, we probably have about 15 hours of recordings in Shuba across a range of narratives. For this today I have worked with four hours of transcribed materials with 10 participants. They're archived, I've given the link for paradisec there, they're also about to be live on ELAR as well. You can access those. Every recording I talk about today has a reference code so you can find the recording at the archive if you want to listen to it again or see the example or see the example in its larger context. Because it is a somewhat opportunistic corpus we're sometimes limited by for example a lack of very good light in this middle panel here, but this was the only day these gentlemen were in town so we kind of had to make the most of it. You can kind of make him out that it's a bit hard there. Otherwise with Passaung Maya and a lot of the others were sitting outside so the light is great, it occasionally gets a bit windy. And part of it is always, people always like to kind of look at the videos afterwards and I think that's an important part of the process is making sure people feel comfortable with the recordings we've made so that they feel comfortable with the idea that I will show them to other people. From that four hours there are about 20 tokens of the rotated palms gesture and there are 13 tokens of this away negative gesture, both of which I will look at in this talk. And the full set of tokens for each is given in slides at the end of this talk. They're very unexciting, detailed, oriented slides. It will give the speaker the time in the recording the speech and a translation. So this is some work that I presented at the International Gesture Society Conference back last summer and I'm now in the process of writing up on the repeated palms interrogative gesture. So this is that upward movement that we saw in Pasangmaye's recording and if you have ever worked or lived or travelled through the larger kind of Indian influenced area this gesture may not be entirely unfamiliar to you. In its use without speech it can be more emblematic so it can this is a gesture that can be used without speech and if I do this to someone it would mean something like what are you doing if I did something like that with a bit of a head flick it usually means where you're going. So it has a pretty stable meaning in the absence of speech and I have this kind of just some illustration of its broader use so on the left here we have two of the Ilam Yulmu speakers and one of them used this gesture during one of his narratives. This is a photo I took of a woman through a window in a public square in Kathmandu, a very lovely example of kind of valley architectural carving there but also a really nice example of gesture so something for everyone in that photograph and the photo on the right is a woman in this was a photo that was attached to a lot of Facebook posts and public media post the night the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal and the rotated hands along with the shrug indicates a meaning of like well in Nepal it's kerkane and it's kind of a meaning of like what are you going to do it has a kind of fatalistic quite quite useful if you've ever had to navigate Kathmandu traffic or if you've ever had to sit at kind of immigration lines in Kathmandu this is a very useful one what are you what are you going to do there's it's beyond your control. So the kind of you know this woman with her fatalistic shrug of what are you going to do and the crumbled building in the background kind of encapsulates a lot of the sentiment as people were trying to put their lads together after the earthquake and the orientation of the hands I'll talk about but it can be kind of open like this or up like this. So this gesture occurs kind of around questions and so just to kind of give you a a brief introduction to questions in the language there's no change in word order but you'll often get a bit of rising intonation. There are a variety of question types and they'll be relevant when we're talking about kind of the functions of this and they're the question types you get in in all languages polar questions where there's a kind of one or two options alternative when you're given multiple constrained options other than just yes and no and then content questions which are kind of more open in terms of how you can respond. And I've done a bit of work with the question structure in Llamjongilmu which is closely related in terms of the evidential structure. So there's a set of evidentials that mark source of knowledge and these are about anticipating so if I ask you a question I will try and use the evidential that I think you are most likely to respond with which is not the same for evidential languages across the world. There are a variety of strategies languages use and so this is kind of what we know syntactically but we need to build a bigger picture of the pragmatics of interrogativity and how that works in these languages. I think sometimes you know we get as far as being out of kind of pick out the basic syntactic functions but it's good to have a bigger picture idea of this. So the thing with the command gestures kind of fun or challenging or very frustrating to work with sometimes is that they have compared to what you might be used to with syntactic features a great deal of underspecification in terms of how they're performed so what you're going to see in the discussion of the features and today I'll be looking at the handshape the orientation which hand people use and the trajectory or movement of the hands not all gestures conform on all dimensions to the kind of summary that I'm giving but what I hope that I can kind of convey to you is that all of these gestures are kind of of a broad type. So as I mentioned the handshape tends to have um as I kind of was doing but it can have a kind of a seven hand or a pistol hand kind of shape or it can be a bit looser but there's usually some kind of you know if you if you wanted to really over articulate this as an emblem in the absence of speech you might do a kind of full clenching in of these fingers an extension of your thumb an index finger um but often what we find is in speech it's a very underspecified so that introductory example from Pasang Maya it's hardly more than just a little flick and the hands aren't particularly loosely or tightly bunched. The hand orientation as I mentioned can vary um either it can be horizontal or it can be vertical um my again kind of only looking at this corpus but also um bringing in kind of anecdotal examples that I can think of in the face to face uh while talking using these with speech orientation tends to be this kind of horizontal um but in the absence of speech when trying to use them emblematically you get a more vertical example and this is a really nice just illustration of that. This photo on the end here is of a young Shuba speaking man at his wedding um and in this really noisy environment he's kind of trying to signal someone far away and he's kind of sending them this kind of question the question is possibly what's happening or what are you doing um but in the absence of speech it has a more vertical orientation and um I have a to kind of show that these things aren't always fixed and they can be kind of played with in interaction I have a really nice example from Kathmandu and a speaker of Newar who I lived with um and Nepali so this is not a Shuba speaker but as we were approaching each other on the busy street um and I kind of we didn't expect to see each other um walking down a street near the house and as we're approaching each other I get this from her and so instead of being a kind of publicly displayed use of the gesture it's just it was just a little flick around and so this is kind of a personal use of the gesture even in a public space so orientation although I say you know it's either vertical or horizontal um these things can be played with in context um the handedness of this gesture so whether people perform at one-handed or two um varies depending on speaker which given that everyone who's in this corpus was only recorded on one day it may be that there's inter-speaker variation it may be depending on the context the speaker is more likely to use one hand or two um Larchel on the right here is a fabulous over articulator of gestures um both for this and for the other gesture that I'll look at in both cases whatever the most extreme handshape or trajectory is going to be you can put money on in the fact that it's going to be Larchel who's going to be my example for that um whereas Jude here has he spent the entire recording fiddling with bits of grass from the so he always had his other handful so it's not clear if it's a preference for one-handed or he was just kind of distracted by fidgeting um but there's there's a mixed preference and there seems to be a mixed preference in terms of we saw the young guy in the still photo was using one hand the old woman with her kind of shrug in the earthquake was using two so the handedness doesn't appear to be particularly fixed um in terms of the trajectory speakers move their hands upwards um or they just rotate them from wherever they're resting at that point um it seems like the upward movement is a a thing that can happen but it's the rotation of the hand that's primary here and uh interestingly or kind of a thing to discuss more broadly is that we know cross linguistically the gestures that are palm upward tend to get convey some sense of presentation to people um so i'm kind of i'm presenting you with an idea or the topic of conversation or something very concrete and physical like miming a tray or something but um palm upward gestures tend to have a sense of showing stuff um the rotation and interrogativity appear to be somewhat interrelated um so when i presented this at ISGS Adam Kenden who spent many years working with Australian Aboriginal Sign Languages was like oh are we exactly the same function with exactly the same kind of gesture occurs in these languages and obviously the fact that it is exactly the same is to some degree kind of the kind of coincidence where the word for dog is the same in English and Baba Ram sometimes there's a bit of just a confluence of um chance but to the same extent i think that there is something about the way and we'll see this more strongly with the negative away gesture that i'll come to in a minute is that there is something about the turning of the hand that indicates the kind of metaphorical so to speak kind of turning over of the the responsibility in the interaction so i'm kind of if i'm asking a question i'm kind of moving the burden of the interaction over to the other speaker and the opening of the hands upward but the rotation seems to be part of that in terms of the function of this gesture um as an interrogative it tends to have three broad functions and i will go through these um these functions are all a pragmatic function so when a lot of people think about gestures the first things they think about are diactics which point to stuff um or iconic gestures that refer to objects in the real world um so i might refer to um my cup of coffee that i had earlier um or to the computer and these kind of represent physical things um another function that gestures can have and that this gesture is having is marking something about the pragmatic structure of the interaction um and here we move from pragmatic functions that are very much grounded in the overtly grammatical nature of interrogativity and move through to something a bit more abstract than that so i'll go through those the first is that it occurs with interrogative utterances um in the examples that i have it tends to give it a bit of an interrogate a rhetorical sense um that might just be because i have a lot of narratives where people are saying quite rhetorical kind of silly questions um again we have Parthang Maya and the story of the the crows and she's like well what do i have to eat so this is the example that we saw earlier she's saying she's sandy what do i so when she says what do i eat she turns her hands this way it's a bit facetious she's like well what am i going to eat i've got she doesn't have anything that is abundantly clear from the story um but the uh because it's kind of a question that she really wants to impress upon her interlocutor you know i don't have anything crows what am i going to eat um that's kind of what the gesture helps to mark um we see it here again so during the during the these kind of talking he's like well what do i say and he's kind of he's kind of asking me and the other people who are sitting there while we're recording he's kind of asking himself he doesn't really want an answer it's a rhetorical question but it does have a grammatical question structure and this is another story Parthang Maya had a great collection of stories um this is one about the jackal who tricks someone into admitting that they've done something foolish by doing something foolish and prevent and asking them to um challenging them to kind of admit that the jackal has done something foolish and by extension themselves um and so the jackal puts on uh he rubs his face with coal and he walks past this guy and the guy's like what have you been doing your face is covered in coal what's happening and the jackal's like oh i've been so busy lighting fires in the river and the guy goes well you've been lighting fires in the river like how do you do that and then the jackal says well you can't light a fire in the river can you and you also can't say that your oil extraction machine gave birth to that guy's horse so give that guy's horse back um and so this this very rhetorical question is accompanied by this rotating gesture and she holds it all the way through she holds it through the you also can't light a fire in the river can you so she holds it even for the tag to really enforce the kind of fact that this is a larger rhetorical question we also see that these gestures are used with non-interrogative utterances and in these cases um you might say well it's used without a question so it's not really doing anything questiony um but in these utterances they tend to have either a sense in which the person is posing a hypothetical um or the speaker is uncertain about the content of the utterance um so this is uh talking about the difference between cats and dogs so that was very quick there i have just a a cap to show you that there was a very quick rotation of the hand there um but what we see here is he's posing a hypothetical um cats get fed because they beg this big difference between cats and dogs um dogs don't beg if they begged if it could eat so we have um this kind of quick rotation of the hand there as part of the hypothetical structure and uh in this one we see Sung Boos talking about as though the events were a dream so there's some kind of uncertainty or unreality to the events and so he's kind of not not staking in particular certainty on it in the same way that some people might use an interrogative to mark reduced certainty he's using this hand shape here as part of that we also see here a nice example of a kind of middle ground between this full blown emblematic use um and use that's independent of speech but very closely related to the following content um and so conveniently this is a question we get quite a few times throughout the recordings where people kind of talk and then they're like oh uh what what should I say um and it turns out that these are great as a location for this kind of of gesture it's great for these kind of rhetorical questions so what we see here is karma um is uh he performs the gesture and then there's actually quite a bit of um time between the gesture and the utterance so he says he kind of stops and he's like what do I say and it kind of gives you an example of how this gesture can move away from being something that's closely tied to speech into something that is a full blown emblem by itself without any speech and it still conveys this kind of question sense this corpus obviously doesn't lend itself to the use of this gesture in the absence of speech because it is a corpus designed around people speaking um but what we see with this gesture is that it is um although we have this kind of unified hand shape across the different uses um it can occur in a range of pragmatic functions including with questions in question like scenarios and in the absence of speech um and so what we have now is a much broader idea of interrogativity um in Tuba and how it is used interactively beyond justice in tax but also in terms of of how people engage with that in interaction and how they mark things has been kind of rhetorically interrogative um and that things like hypotheticals their dates might actually be closer to things like interrogativity than a purely grammatical analysis might give you the so we've kind of covered the bit where Pathlmyra in the video puts her hands up so we're like one second in and now we're going to look at the part where pretty soon before after she she flicks her hands down and away and so we will have covered kind of two seconds of the video um in trying to understand what's happening with the gestures in it um so an earlier version of this work was presented at the gesture conference in Portugal earlier this year um and I'm writing it up this week so Hannah we'll get to hear all about the writing process in our next session but for now you kind of you get the the videos and the fun bits so as I mentioned before raising the hands up across the world's languages and the gestural repertoire that they have seems to indicate some kind of often presenting something either concrete or abstract to to your interlocutor there is also a strong set of literature that some use of awareness in the gesture and the awareness might be kind of holding something with your handshape away or it might be the trajectory of movement indicate some kind of negative thing um so unsurprisingly again the majority of this literature comes from European languages um Kenden described this um for Italian and English and we often find in the literature there's a lot of agreement people say you know so for Kenden Italian and English both have the sense that a holding away gesture indicates something that's denied negated interrupted or stopped um we've also seen other people work on English work on French and Spanish and Bressam and Muller have put together a kind of survey paper that draws together a lot of that research um and attempts to define some kind of larger action scheme for the relationship between a way and negation um Bressam has also extended that to Savo Savo which is a Papua language of the Solomon Islands so that is a very exciting Lee not European data point for that and Brooks in her survey of the repertoire of um Galten young men who are so like young black men in urban Johannesburg um in that repertoire set there are quite a few gestures that have some kind of relationship between a way and negation and the kind of the theory is that um the action scheme demonstrates some kind of embodied root of negation so if we move something out of our immediate space then we're kind of absentee it from the discourse space or negating it from the kind of conversational space the Schubert corpus is actually a really useful place to look for the relationship between negation and a wayness um partly because of the genre in which a lot of people speak and something that is kind of can be translated as kind of suffering stories so whereas we might be taught to always put on our braver space and not bore people with sad news and always try and be upbeat in a Schubert narrative what we see frequently is that it is not only perfectly acceptable to talk about your sufferings but it's a way of kind of marking your legitimacy um and to be honest I'm not really like a narrative studies person so I don't want to kind of um over overstate this but um here's a nice uh excerpt from a song that was illustrated as part of the picture book series and this kind of conversational tone is pretty common in the area not just within I would say the Schubert community but kind of across this area more generally so you know we don't have buses we don't have electricity um you know we do it pretty tough but we kind of it's it's a kind of uh you know as an Australian English speaker the battle of mentality um kind of comes to mind pretty quickly like people doing it tough and proud of themselves for doing it tough um but it leads to lots of situations where people talk about what they don't have which is really useful for this kind of gesture analysis um so I'm going to look at one particular away gesture which involves a something of a sweeping away of the hands um I don't want to say that this is the only negation gesture that we get in the language it's part of a larger repertoire I'm just going to be focusing on this one today just to kind of prove there are other negative gestures in the language we conveniently have someone doing a kind of wiping away and a head shake at the same time for saying you can't do something you want to play too much negation it's not going to do it it's not the kind of so he's got the head shake and he's got this kind of wiping gesture they are two things we are not looking at um but I wanted to just kind of let you know that I'm not saying this is the entirety of negation um but it is one function of it so as a kind of overview holistically of this type of away gesture and what it's doing the hands are loose um they tend to um the fingers tend to splay outward and open up towards the end of the stroke of that gesture palms are down there's a kind of a movement away it's often an opening of the hand and just an extension of the finger laquel my great over gesture performer will give you the kind of full forearm movement but for other speakers it's generally just the hand mostly two-handed I only have one example of a one-handed performance so unlike the interrogative where kind of people would do two or one for this both hands seem to be important um and it's aligned with a negative noun phrase which is often a negative indefinite pronoun so it's something like we have nothing or there's no one um and it has a function of pragmatically emphasising the the lack of something in the speech and it's closest to as I said Bressam Emula did this survey um it's closest to their sweeping away type so they sub-categorised the away negative gestures that they had I'll come back to closest to as a phrase um towards the end of this analysis so this is kind of my for me personally the kind of the prototypical performance of this gesture we have two here one where he says we have no roads and one where he says we have no light or electricity it's kind of sweeping away the handshape has a trajectory as I said of down and away and there's a bit of a small rotation there which kind of gives it that sweeping away feeling that Bressam Emula talk about so just now that you've been introduced to the interrogative gesture and now that you have been introduced to kind of the basic idea of this negative away gesture we can revisit um Hasan Maya's uh narrative that I played at the start and you can kind of look at that hand movements again with that in mind so these are pretty underperformed in terms of if you weren't looking for them it would just look like she's kind of moving her hands around a little bit um but they occur in the kind of prototypical area even though the fingers aren't very articulated we get those movements of the hands um yay locale always there with a kind of extreme example so now you've seen these tiny little flicks of the hands um in similar situations we get this from good old locale so we get extension and then even more extension there which is really great and this tends to be this is not quite the same brushing away but it's definitely a moving away trajectory there um the palm downward orientation is still more or less maintained um and we do see some degree of openness from everyone else that definitely not this fully extended um I alternate between wondering if this is like a slightly different gesture or if he is and I think this is possibly more the case just a very exuberant performer when it comes to telling a good story um this is my only example of one-handed use and I don't know if you'll see from this clip or not but I think it comes directly after another one-handed gesture so the fact that it's one-handed might just be constrained by the previous previous gesture use right so I've clicked that he's so he's got one hand down and he's already used his hand for something else and then because it's just sitting there he goes straight into a one-handed performance of the gesture and you really see with Sungwoo this opening out and flicking away handshape um one thing that is really neat about the negative away gesture is how neatly it aligns with the speech um and I say that but this is actually true for a lot of gesture um the integration with speech is incredibly well timed and whenever whenever I teach gesture courses I feel like at least 50% of the courses may just saying really stupidly obvious things but even to this day it completely blows my mind how the human brain works so these people are hitting the stroke so they're hitting the bit where they kind of flick the fingers outward at the start of the negative and the negatives in this language will start with a me or a ma so um as they're saying me or ma their hands are doing this now in order to get your hands to be doing that at the point that you are saying me or ma you had to have started moving them at some earlier point so you have to know and this is like it's pretty obvious in order to do this at this point you have to be doing like the getting to that point earlier but the fact that our brains can know that they're going to have to be hitting this in the speech and this in the gesture but they have to know that an earlier time point constantly amazes me um and what we see consistently there are only one or two examples that don't fit this and I think they both have good narrative reasons why they don't but what we see again and again is that the onset begins at the start of that negative phrase or the onset begins at the start of the noun phrase more or less and the stroke hits the stroke with the negative content um not only is it cool that all the speakers do this across the corpus but this actually conforms to what Harrison has found for English so Harrison looked at the temporal alignment of the stroke and the negative in English and found pretty much the same thing so this is something that is kind of how humans do negation um something is inherent about that node of the negation so in this language it's me or ma in English it would be something like not or won't um but speakers structure their negative utterance and structure their performance of a negative gesture very temporally tied around that that one node in terms of the function the gesture kind of unsurprisingly probably at this point is used to emphasise the negative value of the noun phrase so we don't see this away gesture people aren't saying oh we have roads we have electricity this gesture with the outward away movement only occurs when talking about what they don't have or what the person in the story doesn't have um so if they have nothing um if they've got no electricity if they've got no roads then this gesture is used so the fact that we have some close relationship semantically and functionally between negation and away means that it fits Bressam and Mueller's away family broadly but if we look at their 2014 paper they specifically say that it motivated by keeping or moving things away from the discourse space and I think we can agree that's kind of what's happening but they say that the space is cleared of annoying or otherwise unwanted objects in the discourse and my feeling is that it's very hard to argue that super speakers do not want electricity um or do not want or the the woman in the story did not want food um so I think what we need here is actually a broader approach to the relationship between awareness and negation and this idea of unwanted things doesn't quite fit um because these objects that people very much want so for these what we have is a set of gestures with co-speech pragmatic functions they emphasise negative noun phrases particularly indefinite pronouns um as I said there's no use these occur with positives um it broadens the survey so now we have you know four or five European languages and we've got wow we've got like three non-European languages um that indicate that this relationship between awareness and negation fits with our idea of embodied gestures that we see across different languages um but it also indicates that we need a broader understanding of what that relationship is so there's two studies that I've been working on while I've been at SELAS um it's just another opportunity for some performed authenticity but an opportunity to kind of do something I really like to do in Nepal which is just sit and take stock of all of that you don't really need to take home any of those specific points um but if there was a conclusion of things that I would like you to remember in descending order of importance um video your documentation if I had just made audio recordings I'd be sitting here going hi I vaguely remember she did something weird with her hands but I can't feel like I remember what that is um remember that gesture is part of the linguistic content um so when you're thinking about questions or negation go back and look and see if there is any of this kind of consistent performance of gesture that corresponds with it you don't have to study it yourself you could always drop me an email which is at the end of these talk um you know there are people who are very interested in this stuff who I think would be very interested in seeing more data from languages that are outside of Europe um and those other places and then remember that gesture can be useful in giving you insights into the structure of speech so here we saw that kind of the structure of negation is very consistently performed both lexically and gesturally um the pragmatic function of speech so there are non-interrogatively marked speech hacks that have sentences that seem to have some kind of relationship to interrogativity um in this talk and the embodied nature of cognition so there is something about a lack of something or removing something from the discourse space that relates to negativity and there's something about rotating the hands that appears to be kind of turning over the interactional turn um and that is one of the reasons that I think gesture is cool and one of the nice things about doing this research and having the opportunity to come here and work on an ELDP fellowship is that I can now do this and that has been very satisfying as I promised here are the tokens that I talked about these are the references and I have the slides in the link that is conveniently cropped there but I can send those to you if you would like so thank you very much thank you very much Lauren um do we have any questions comments other people's experiences that they want to to share or draw anecdote always welcome I was just wondering in general is that like this is new to me like with that inversion for the interrogatives that I'm going to do with inversion in syntax as well that people use to make questions don't they we would need a lot more gesture but I mean people and this kind of you know I don't want to even like say words because I'll just hum out with some offensively stereotypical accent but the like twisting your hands and you know this is when I tell people this about the work I'm doing in Nepal people are like well obviously like and I just I just did it yeah obviously that is going to be a question um so the you know we're still figuring out the relationship between these things um but there is but there is no inversion in questions in Shiva yeah they don't happen but if it's all cognitively based then it's yeah I don't I have no feeling for the cognitive basis of lexical inversion in sentence structure but if someone does it cool yeah did you have the so did you segment for the form the gesture and then you turned the sound on and found the all right so there's a paper Bressam and Mueller have a new paper coming out in linguistic vanguards that I was just reading so that's going to be the springboard for my answer in which they say looking at the relationship between speech and gesture in these kind of studies tends to either come they go speech first and then they go oh it's happening with the gesture or they go form first for the gesture and then they say what speech does that link with this process has been in as much as it can be much more kind of both at the same time because I've been grappling with the basic transcription and documentation while also keeping an eye on these forms so the process has generally been I would say from my un-interrogated instinct is that I've been looking at the form confirming that it has that kind of lexical relationship and it's not someone saying you know I brushed off the dusty clothes or something making sure it doesn't have that kind of lexical relationship and then going from there so it is very much analysing an opportunistic collection of data and then in an opportunistic way analysing that and I'm I'm aware of that but that is kind of the challenge of working with this kind of corpus yeah um that just includes studies that have been done on um gesture so but I mean different sign languages have had differing degrees of gesture analysis done as well as basic sign but there is um so one really cool thing that we have for the interrogative is that in Indian sign and Pakistani sign this hand shape is actually the WH question marker so it is a sufficiently common emblematic gesture in the area that it's been grammaticalised into the local sign languages so that was a really nice um someone at ISGS at the end was just like oh you mean just like in in Indian sign language and I was like um yes apparently exactly like in Indian sign language so it kind of gives a good indication of the the strength of that aerial spread of that gesture okay a question so actually maybe you followed on from the previous two so um one was kind of related to your question so I don't work on gesture but I do work on syntax and it may be just by challenge but the two examples that you draw on so interrogatives and negation are things that are cross-linguistically like marked one way or another right um so you talk about yeah I think even in some of your negation examples there's an emphatic marker before them so I want to know if you can if you have any thoughts or comments on the idea that if you take something like that which seems to be what most of your speakers are doing and most of them are sitting down as unmarked and anything else as somehow marked um whether you would find or expect so like cross-linguistically you have like negation um interrogatives other type of focus constructions relative clauses all those kind of things also come up co-articulated, co-gestured um yes the answer is yes the majority of papers on pragmatic functions of gesture look at questions or things that turn the interaction over to someone else or negation or emphasis so the there's a paper on the ring gesture in German um and I know as an English speaker I sometimes use this as well but when you really want to make a point clear or really when you really want to make a point clear you used to um and so um these interactively and syntactically marked and gestureally marked constructions I think it's a it is a a confluence that happens there and then maybe a related point because you mentioned the grammationalization perhaps in Pakistani and Indian sign language so you have this point where um Breson and Wula study they have this kind of brushing things away or refusing or not wanting them um and you say that that's not like they're not saying oh we don't want and it's just still we don't want this um I wonder about the idea that actually it is a grammaticalized version so basically kind of metaphorical and semantic extension from not wanting something in a much more literal sense to negating and and those kind of things rather than actually we don't yeah I mean my gut feeling is two things there are two directions I'll go in here my gut feeling is that um and this is kind of what what I'm working on now is that it's actually the opposite and the kind of just general negation in a way is is a bit the absence of something is what's being marked and then the kind of thing that they're talking about is an additional meaning but that would involve working on more languages than Shuba and I feel like I already have enough going on there um and the other thing is that um there was something I was going to have a drink of water well I think about the other thing I was going to say which is um in their study they talk about this brushing away gesture as being um it it is for things that are like trivial or not you know in the way that you like for them the extension of you flick stuff off it's it's a very deprecating that is the word I want deprecating action um and I think to some extent that captures something what's happening here it's like we don't have roads but like it's it's not a thing to be made a thing of um and I think there's something about the way these hardships are discussed where this deprecating sense is is a useful way of thinking about it but that's as far as I've got with that so far so yeah I I mean what we need to do now slash me need to do now is go back to an English corpus and start building examples where we find a way being used with um not necessarily disparaging senses and then yeah whether it's grammaticalized one way or the other is then the next thing to figure out perhaps different types of negation so not so well this is so there their analysis was that like all negation and awareness is embedded in this things are unwanted and I think that is an overgeneralisation um if you're just talking about one type and then one kind like if it was just the brushing away you could make a case that it's grammaticalized but when it's all saying that all negation and awareness is centred on this thing being unwanted um I find that's a bit of an overstep I was wondering you're saying that um it's uh so the negative gesture is time to go inside the negative material whatever that might be in the language I was wondering is where you get kind of bite past like marking the negation you do you see that you have I wonder too um so what one thing that's really interesting is that the difference between Harrison's analysis of English and my analysis of Shuba is Harrison gets a lot more long holds of negation gestures and that's because in English anything that's bound to the negative anything that's subordinate to it is occurring after it and so the gesture gets held for the scope of the negation whereas because in Shuba the verb is final um even if there were and and the problem is really that a lot of these sentences are very short but nothing pre the negation is included in the scope so um it only seems to cover the head and nothing that's in its scope that occurs before it so the possibility that different negation structures in different languages engage that timing differently is really quite probable and by party it would be super fun so you've also got for eyes English that have negative negative comment on those that don't yeah really interesting enough there was french in one of the one of the studies not one of your studies I think one of the yeah maybe not negation but yeah there was yeah some french away stuff yeah go back and look and see if they've got anything overtly mentioned about temporal stuff but yeah gesture timing and like lexical structure is a massively awesome but under under examined field so as with as with most of these talks the answer is yes that would be awesome for someone else to find out Peter was just wanted to ask you another a sort of unrelated question you said that gesture wasn't used for dyctic functions did I misunderstand that and I said gesture is used it was was it at the start when I was like when people think about gesture they think about diexus and did you say that you didn't find people do use diexus yeah point like dyctic gestures it's just I'm not looking at those in this talk I this talk was not looking at diectic gestures just in case there were any fans of diexus in the house I wanted to let them know early there's lots of really cool stuff to be done in terms of diexus and hills unsurprisingly in this narrative that's what I was going to ask you is because I don't know if you get it in sugar but in curanti for example yeah you have this above the line of sight below the line of sight marked in the dyctic system not lexically no but it's grammatical in the yeah so so you talk about obviously doing ongoing documentation work and encouraging people to use video so I mean how do you do all of this given that presumably you're also trying to work out how negation in the language works and how integratives work as well as then how gesture so step one is work on a language that's really closely related to the language you've already written a grammar of so do that um yeah for me like I I think for every grant application I've written since my phd it's been I mean look at the grammar and also the gesture and it's taken me seven years to but now that the corpus is built the next postdoc at La Trobe is just finally doing some analysis and so that's the answer is that I spent four years five years figuring out grammar stuff and now it's time to finally really get into the gesture stuff so the other thing is try and get postdocs or students to code stuff for you it's my other these are useless tips for most people but know the language already and have lots of money to pay codes um and then get someone like me to help you do all the literature stuff easy then um yeah or just at least collect the data and flag to someone that there is cool stuff in there because you sit there and you watch it for so long even though you don't really notice it you kind of develop a sense of what is common and uncommon so yeah