TY - GEN
T1 - Non-Arbitrariness across modalities
T2 - Bootstrapping the emergence and development of questions
AU - Cuskley, Christine
AU - Heim, Johannes
PY - 2022/9/5
Y1 - 2022/9/5
N2 - Over the last decade, language evolution research has been the driving force behind a renewed interest in non-arbitrary mappings (Cuskley & Kirby, 2013), as well as multimodal theories of language development (Vigliocco et al., 2014). These theories have focused largely on lexical iconicity in language systems. Here, we begin to extend this line of research by considering how non-arbitrariness plays a role in language development and emergence beyond the lexicon, moving from lexical to pragmatic meaning across different modalities. In other words, we focus on non-arbitrariness in situated language (Murgiano et al., 2021; Özyürek, 2021). Specifically, we consider the role of indices of dominance in scaffolding the development of questions. By surveying the state of the art in research on prosody, gesture, and signing, we outline evidence for cross-linguistically attested, iconic gestural scaffolding of questions across signed and spoken languages. This supports development of indexical use of pitch in question prosody, which has analogies in nonarbitrary dominance signalling. We conclude by synthesizing this evidence, presenting a novel non-arbitrary bootstrapping theory for the emergence of questions.
AB - Over the last decade, language evolution research has been the driving force behind a renewed interest in non-arbitrary mappings (Cuskley & Kirby, 2013), as well as multimodal theories of language development (Vigliocco et al., 2014). These theories have focused largely on lexical iconicity in language systems. Here, we begin to extend this line of research by considering how non-arbitrariness plays a role in language development and emergence beyond the lexicon, moving from lexical to pragmatic meaning across different modalities. In other words, we focus on non-arbitrariness in situated language (Murgiano et al., 2021; Özyürek, 2021). Specifically, we consider the role of indices of dominance in scaffolding the development of questions. By surveying the state of the art in research on prosody, gesture, and signing, we outline evidence for cross-linguistically attested, iconic gestural scaffolding of questions across signed and spoken languages. This supports development of indexical use of pitch in question prosody, which has analogies in nonarbitrary dominance signalling. We conclude by synthesizing this evidence, presenting a novel non-arbitrary bootstrapping theory for the emergence of questions.
U2 - 10.17617/2.3398549
DO - 10.17617/2.3398549
M3 - Published conference contribution
SP - 134
EP - 142
BT - The Evolution of Language
A2 - Ravignani, A.
A2 - Asano, R.
A2 - Valente, D.
A2 - Ferretti, F.
A2 - S., Hartmann
A2 - Hayashi, M.
A2 - Jadoul, Y.
A2 - Martins, M.
A2 - Oseki, Y.
A2 - Rodrigues, E.D.
A2 - Vasileva, O.
A2 - Wacewicz, S.
PB - Joint Conference on Language Evolution
ER -