Pointing in Dialogue

A new approach based on experiments aiming at the integration of content originating from pointing plus definite descriptions (objects called “CDs”) in dialogue is presented. We develop it against the background of the early semiotic positions of Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Quine, the intentionalism of Kaplan, Neo-Peirce-Wittgenstein-Quine approaches and “mixed” points of view. Our experimental data show that pointing gestures are polysemous and polymorphic entities. Polysemy of CDs is due to their different functions, pointing to objects (“object demonstration”) and pointing to regions (“restrictor demonstration”), polymorphism originates from different positions wrt the utterance. Gesture information and expression meaning are integrated into a syntax-semantics interface using constraint-based syntax and typelogical semantics. Finally, it is shown that an underspecification account for the syntax-semantic interface can be set up along the lines of Logical Description Grammars. 1 Overview and Introduction Ch. (1) deals with constraints of pointing gestures and introduces the “ ”-notation for gesture strokes. (2) overviews Peircian to post-Kaplan approaches on demonstration and reference. (3) describes gesture experiments. (4) is on “object demonstration” and “restrictor demonstration”. The set-up of the interface combining constraintbased grammar and type-logics for the integration of multimodal content is specified. (5) deals with the logical form of CDs. (6) shows that an underspecification account for the syntax-semantic interface can be set up along the lines of Logical Description Grammars. Discussion and future research come in (7). Demonstration is bound up with reference (see e.g. Levinson 1995). Demonstrations (characteristically pointings) can accompany simple or complex referring expressions. We represent the stroke of hand gestures (see Mc Neill 1992) and similar devices by “ ”. Up to section (4) the nature of the sign will be left to intuition. It occurs at the position indicated in the string and marks gesture stroke occurrence. Examples of CD-expressions: (1) Grasp this/that.