Dismissive Markers in English

Linguistics

WHO: Jess Law, Killian Kiuttu, Saoirse Duncan

WHAT: We’re currently looking at “speechless shrugs”: shrugging without saying anything (in a conversational setting). In particular, we’re examining what speechless shrugs entail when used to answer a question and how the implied meaning relates to the question itself and any surrounding context.

WHY: This is the first step in testing the compositionality of co-speech gestures, which is to say whether a gesture associated with speech—something like shrugging or shaking your head—can be computed from the meaning of its constituent parts. Many elements of linguistic meaning are compositional in nature, so it’s worth exploring whether the same is true for extralinguistic meaning.

WHAT'S NEXT: We’ll be running an experiment where participants watch videos of scenarios involving speechless shrugs and answer questions about their interpretation of the shrug. This will help us understand the implications of shrugs in different contexts, which could point towards a more general model of shrug semantics.