Fall conference marathon

23 October 2024, by Pamela Sundhausen

Photo: Alex Lowles Photography

Our colleague Cornelia Loos presented her work on co-speech gesture in the response system of German at two conferences this fall. She and her co-author Sophie Repp from the University of Cologne discussed the theoretical aspects of the German response system at the Sinn und Bedeutung meeting in Noto, Italy, while focusing more on the different co-speech gestures used in German responses at MMSYM (Symposium Series on Multimodal Communication) in Frankfurt. Just like DGS signers, speakers of German use a variety of non-manual elements in their responses, with the head taking on a prominent role in both agreeing and rejecting responses.

Cornelia also presented the first results of her project on simultaneity in classifier constructions at the annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Helsinki this summer. Using data from the DGS corpus, she showed that signers rarely represent events happening at the same time simultaneously on both hands. Rather, DGS signers prefer producing two or more signs sequentially to depict such events.