German Research Foundation (DFG Priority Programme 2329) as part of the project Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives (ViCom)

In this project we are interested in assessing how a crucial part of semantics and pragmatics, namely the way that relevant information is packaged in discourse, is encoded multimodally. While many authors have acknowledged the close semantic relationship between prosodic and gestural features of language, very few empirical investigations have been performed on the multimodal marking of information structure. The current project investigates from an experimental and corpus-based perspective the effects that the information structure of an utterance has on the gesture-prosody link across Romance and Germanic language families.