Gestures as markers on non-canonical questions

Abstract

In this paper I argue that both the co-speech and pro-speech symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh ques tions. MAT can with a fast tempo contour and a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semanti cally distinctive: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes a rhetorical non-canonical question. I will argue that the fast contour is the default tempo of MAT and that it brings about a ‘speaker bias’ interpretation. Slowing down the movement occurs when the feature [slow] is added: the semantic contribution of this feature is to generalize the bias introduced by MATto all discourse participants (all discourse participants agree about the answer to the question). The “doxastic harmony” imposed by [slow] is the source of the rhetorical inter pretation of the question. I speculate that tempo plays a similar role in the interpretation of a second symbolic gesture used in Italian, i.e. mani giunte (MG).