Abstract
This paper presents an exploratory production study of Bharatanatyam, a figurative(narrative) dance. We investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in thisdance and argue that a formal semantics of narrative dance can be modeled in line withAbusch’s (2013, 2014, 2015) semantics of visual narrative (drawing also on Schlenker’s,2017a, approach to music semantics). A main finding of our investigation is that larger-levelgroup-boundaries (Charnavel, 2016) can be seen as triggers for discontinuity inferences(possibly involving the dynamic shift from one salient entity to another).Keywords: co-reference, disjoint reference, dance semantics, iconic semantics, picturesemantics.
Highlights
Background and motivationIn this paper, we aim to contribute to new lines of research that look at different cognitive systems and how they relate to each other
For our exploratory production study, we recorded dance sequences based on a set of items that we constructed in order to probe for coreference vs. disjoint reference
We presented an exploratory production study to investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in Bharatanatyam, a figurative dance that serves to tell a story
Summary
We aim to contribute to new lines of research that look at different cognitive systems (in the cognitive science/neuroscience sense; cf. Rebuschat et al, 2011) and how they relate to each other. Focusing on the coreference/disjoint reference distinction, Abusch (2013) investigates comics without words (French sourds), i.e. purely visual narratives. In line with Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle, 1993), she proposes that the referents in comic panels are existentially quantified, (3a-c), and coreference arises from post-semantic identification of discourse referents in the pragmatics (which is a type of pragmatic enrichment), (3d) Such existential quantification is plausible in visual narratives, as there are no definite descriptions comparable to the eaglet in natural language. The questions and insights that Abusch (2013) addresses for comics without words should carry over to any type of silent visual narratives, including narrative dance and pantomime This motivates our case study of Bharatanatyam as presented in the remainder of this paper. If we find that it can be encoded in dance, this can be taken to lend initial support to a view that a semantics of dance may be conceivable
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