A4

Multimodality, Iconicity and the Common Ground: The Status of Speech and Gesture

Project A4 uses experimental methods to investigate the at-issue status of different forms of modification. We compare modification in the visual domain (e.g., speech-accompanying gestures) and in the domain of speech (e.g., adverbials, verbs, ideophones). We focus on the question of how these different information types affect entry into and retrieval from the common ground. Based on the experimental data, the project will contribute to a formal semantic model of the common ground that takes modality, iconicity, and at-issueness into account.

Principal Investigators

Dr. Kathryn Barnes

Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ebert

Prof. Dr. Britta Stolterfoht

Researchers

Lennart Fritzsche

Ramona Saile

Project Activities

Publications

Events

Workshop “At-issueness and Commitment: Interfaces and Interactions”

Talks and Posters

2026

Barnes, K., Fritzsche, L. Shared experience as joint action: A case in point for common ground pluralism. Commentary on Coordinated Action with and without Common Ground by Bart Geurts at Joint Action and the Common Ground workshop , Tübingen, Germany.

Fritzsche, L. Is commitment ever really shared?. Poster at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 31, Nantes, France.

Fritzsche, L. Measuring commitment: A diagnostic comparison using belief–commitment dissociation. Talk at Measuring Commitments in Communication workshop, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Fritzsche, L., Walter, S. Testing the tests: A re-evaluation of at-issueness diagnostics across modalities. Short talk (online) at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 4, Philadelphia, PA, USA.