Abstract
The English ish-construction, in which ish follows an utterance to indicate hedging, is multimodal. It has a prosodic component (a pause between the utterance and ish), and, as observed in this paper, it is often accompanied by a co-speech gesture such as a shrug. Data from a perception study suggests that unlike prosody, gesture is not a grammatical component of the ish-construction. However, gesture does play a significant role in conveying affect to listeners. I suggest that this use of gesture is a not-at-issue contribution to the utterance, and call for further work uniting the semantics/pragmatics and sociolinguistics of gesture.
Highlights
Recent work in multiple subfields of linguistics has investigated the role of gesture in spoken languages
This paper identifies gesture as an additional modality of the English ishconstruction, and seeks to understand the role that gesture plays in the construction
We find that unlike prosody, gesture does not influence the grammaticality of the construction
Summary
Recent work in multiple subfields of linguistics has investigated the role of gesture in spoken languages. Semanticists have been making inquiries into what meaning CO-SPEECH GESTURES contribute to an utterance (Esipova 2019, Tieu et al 2018, Zlogar and Davidson 2018, inter alia). Variationist sociolinguists have been exploring the role of EMBODIMENT in structuring linguistic variation and what social meaning is conveyed by embodiment (Podesva et al 2015, Voight et al 2016). The ultimate claim of this paper is that these two research domains overlap to a considerable degree, at least insofar as embodiment includes physical movement accompanying spoken language. I make use of the following observation: English utterances which involve the ishconstruction (1) typically involve a gestural component such as a shrug (Danny Erker p.c.).
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