Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

How the environment shapes gender marking in mimed stories

Speaker Marta Sibierska
Affiliaton(s) Mikołaj Kopernik University, Toruń
Date 05.02.2025, 10:00 - 10:45 Uhr
Time 10:00 o'clock
Venue ZAS, Pariser Str. 1, 10719 Berlin; Room: Ilse-Zimmermann-Saal (Ground floor)

Abstract

In this study, we were interested in how non-verbal whole-body communication (cf. “pantomime” in Żywiczyński et al., 2018) is influenced by environment—specifically, to what extent the referent and the social environments (cf. Nölle et al., 2018) shape the choice of strategies for marking gender of characters in mimed stories. To investigate that, we rated video recordings of participants playing a charades-like guessing game, where they took turns miming stories and matching them to sequences of pictures (Sibierska et al., 2023). Although this task put no pressure to disambiguate between the characters in the stories, most of the participants did it anyway, using either iconic or indexical gender markers. Our analysis showed that:
(A) In the case of stories, the pressure for efficiency (cf. Levshina & Moran, 2021; Wacewicz & Żywiczyński, 2024) does not work the same way as with other referent environments: the participants communicated the traits of characters even though this was not necessary for communicative success; but, at the same time, the participants used only one strategy for gender marking at a time, avoiding redundancy.
(B) Unsurprisingly, it is the opportunity to point to something that makes an index. When the gender of the characters in a story (the referent environment) did not match the gender of the participants (the social environment), the participants preferred to use icons rather than indexes. If, in turn, there was a half or a full match between the genders of the characters and the participants, icons were still preferred, but the likelihood of using an index increased.

We discuss these results in the context of language evolution, especially pantomimic scenarios of language origins (e.g., Arbib, 2018, 2024; Zlatev et al., 2020; Wacewicz & Żywiczyński, 2021), stressing the importance of examining the influence of environment and the role of indexes in the emergence of communication systems.

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