ZASxTalks: On the multimodal expression of focus and givenness

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Abstract

This talk discusses studies that explore the interplay between prosody and gesture in the expression of information structure, adopting a multimodal perspective. Focusing on the multimodal marking of the information status of discourse referents and different focus types, a unifying observation emerges: increasing pragmatic salience—whether due to increased informativity or contrastivity—correlates with stronger multimodal prominence. This is reflected in an increase of both acoustic/prosodic and kinematic/visual cues contributing to prominence marking. The reviewed findings are discussed with reference to theoretical accounts on the coupling of prosodic and visual modalities. The conclusion is that research on multimodal marking of information structure points to the clear role of multimodal prominence in signaling informativity and contrastivity. Yet research remains relatively sparse, underscoring the need for future studies that systematically investigate both the integration and interaction of auditory and visual modalities in signaling information structure.

Bio

Frank Kügler is Professor of Linguistics at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests are in cross-linguistic prosody from various different perspectives such as the expression and modelling of information structure, prominence and sentence mode in typologically unrelated languages, the interaction of tone and intonation, and prosodic phrasing and recursive prosodic constituents at the prosody-syntax interface. His recent interests  also include the multimodal expression of information structure, in particular the integration of gesture and prosody. He has worked on the prosody of a number of typologically diverse languages including Mandarin, Hindi, Akan, Tswana, Ghanaian English, Yucatec Maya, Hungarian, and German among others.