PI of the project "Towards a Morphology of Recurrent Gestures" at Sign Lab Göttingen, as part of the DFG Collaborative Research Program 2329 „Visuelle Kommunikation. Theoretische, empirische und angewandte Perspektiven (ViCom)“.

This project explores how compositionality emerges in recurrent gestures and whether recurring parameters such as movement patterns or hand shape function as meaning-bearing units, meaning-differentiating features, or structural elements. Adopting a corpus-based and experimental approach, the project examines formal variation within individual recurrent gestures as well as parameters shared across different gestures.
By systematically investigating (a) which parameters recur within single recurrent gestures and (b) which are shared across recurrent gestures while maintaining the same meaning, the project will build a repertoire of recurring form parameters. Given the uncertain status of these parameters, (c) a theoretical discussion will explore whether gestural form parameters may resemble linguistic units such as morphemes and allomorphs, or whether they instead follow modality-specific principles of composition.

PI of the project "Stabilization processes in gestures. A media-specific and cross-modality approach" at Sign Lab Göttingen, as part of the DFG Collaborative Research Program 2329 "„Visuelle Kommunikation. Theoretische, empirische und angewandte Perspektiven (ViCom)“.

Recurrent gestures, which are often used with speech, show functional similarities to elements of spoken and signed languages and form culturally shared repertoires of meaning, but research has so far mainly focused on spontaneous gestures. The research project investigates stabilization processes of these gestures and compares them with lexicalization and grammaticalization processes in sign languages in order to describe stable gesture families and the dynamics of gesture sequences. It aims to formulate a medium-specific and cross-modality approach that identifies common and language-specific features of gestures and signs.

Project output:

Bauer, Anastasia & Silva H. Ladewig (in revision). Recurrent head gestures in signed and spoken language, eingereicht bei Open Linguistics, Special Issue "Gestural elements in signed and spoken languages", hrsg. Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen & Sandra Debreslioska.

Bauer, Anastasia, Patrick C. Trettenbrein, Aleksandra Ćwiek, Petra B. Schumacher, Lisa-Marie Krause, Martin Schulte-Rüther, Chiara Zulberti, Anna Kuder, Silva H. Ladewig, Marc Schulder, Federica Amici, Door Spruijt, & Susanne Fuchs (submitted). Data Collection for Research on Multimodal Language and Communication: Methodological Challenges, Strategies and Workflow in Behavioural Sciences.

Preprint: Bauer, A., Trettenbrein, P. C., Amici, F., Ćwiek, A., Fuchs, S., Krause, L., … Schulte-Rüther, M. (2025, March 28). Data Collection in Multimodal Language and Communication Research: A Flexible Decision Framework. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/42tud_v1

Ladewig, Silva H. (in press/2026). Iconicity in co-speech gestures. In: Olga Fischer, Kimi Akita and Pamela Perniss (Hgg.) Handbook on Iconicity in Language. Oxford University Press.

Ladewig, Silva H. (2025). Aktuelle Trends und Entwicklungen in der linguistischen Gesten- und Multimodalitätsforschung In: Linguistische Berichte 283, 253-318.  https://doi.org/10.46771/9783967699494_2

Ladewig, Silva H. (2025). Embodied sharpness: exploring the slicing gesture in political talk shows, In: Frontiers in Psychology 15. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1494192

Ladewig, S. H. (2024). Recurrent Gestures: Cultural, Individual, and Linguistic Dimensions of Meaning Making. In A. Cienki (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies. Cambridge University Press, 32-55.

Co-coordinator in the projced Multimodal Stancetaking: Expressive Movement and Affective Stance. Political Debates in the German Bundestag and the Polish Sejm (funded by Beethoven program of the DFG/NCN).

http://mmstance.home.amu.edu.pl

Together with Vinicius Macuch Silva, we analyze whether and which recurrent gestures co-occur with the modal particle eigentlich as part of the DFG Collaborative Research Program 2392 “Visual Communication. Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives” (ViCom).

A key open question in this context is whether recurrent gestures systematically co-occur with verbal elements that express similar meanings, such as discourse particles. This question is at the core of our collaborative project. Based on interactional data from spoken German, we investigate the multimodal distribution of a verbal expression that is expected to co-occur with recurrent gestures marking pragmatic contrast.

Project Output

July 2025; ISGS 10, Nijmegen, "Marking Contrast Multimodally: The Co-Occurrence of ‘eigentlich’ and Palm-Up Gestures in Spoken German; Panel: "A multi-approach study of recurrent gestures and linguistic particles across languages" (organized by Simon Harrison, Silva H. Ladewig, & Suwei Wu)

The collaboration between the ViCom projects "StabiGest" and "MultIS" analyzes the use and meaning of recurring gestures in longer sequences. The study focuses on the prosodic analysis of Slicing gestures and their role in emphasizing and structuring discourse.

Working on the project: Frank Kügler (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), Pilar Prieto Vives (Universität Pompeu Fabra), Alina Gregori (Goethe University Frankfurt), Paula Ginesa Sánchez Ramón (Goethe University Frankfurt).

Pilot corpus study on head movements in spoken and signed languages, together with Anastasia Bauer (University of Cologne) within the DFG Collaborative Research Program 2392 "Visual Communication" (ViCom).

Are recurrent non-manual movement also shared amongst spoken and signed language communities? This is where this collaborative project ties in. By focusing on interactional data from spoken and signed language corpora we will conduct a collaborative study of one non-manual recurrent movement and compare it cross-modally in German spoken langauge and DGS. We will concentrate on head nods, the most commonly produced bodily signals in interaction.

Project output:

Bauer, A. & S.H. Ladewig (under revision. Recurrent head gestures in signed and spoken language, to be submitted to Open Linguistics, Special Issue "Gestural elements in signed and spoken languages", ed. by Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen & Sandra Debreslioska.

Collaboration with Chiara Zulberti, Katja Liebal und Federica Amici (Compositional Structures in Chimpanzee Gestural Communication, University of Leipzig), within the DFG Collaborative Research Program 2392 "Visual Communication" (ViCom) and Jana Bressem (TU Chemnitz).

In this project, we aim to address these limitations by implementing a novel bottom-up form-based approach to reliably identify different gesture types in chimpanzee communication. This method will allow us to systematically assign gesture units to different categories based on their formal features, reducing the subjective bias of top-down classifications. Specifically, the hereby proposed collaboration has two main objectives:

1. to develop a coding scheme that describes salient aspects and criteria of gestural forms in chimpanzees
2. to apply this form-based coding scheme to the identification of chimpanzee gesture types

This approach will foster a comparative understanding of gestural communication, by developing and testing a form-based tool for the categorizations of gesture types in species other than humans.

Project output

Conference presentation: 5.-7. June 2024, EFP 2024, Lausanne, Schweiz. ChimpLASG: a form-based approach to the classification of chimpanzee gestures.

Comparative linguistic study of cyclic gesture (English, Farsi and German) together with Laura Hirrel (University of New Mexico, USA), funded by the Viadrina International Program for Graduates

This project investigated the relationship between cyclic gestures and aspectual expression in English, German and Persian (Farsi) to explore which aspectual constructions commonly accompany cyclic gestures and whether there are cross-linguistic similarities as well as language-specific patterns. The study found that cyclic gestures are commonly used with continuous, habitual and iterative aspects in all three languages, but there is no end-to-end stability of form, although language-specific features may influence formal variability. These results support the assumption that cyclic gestures are based on experienced cyclic movements and point to an interaction of language and gesture at the grammatical level that may lead to the formation of language-specific multimodal constructions.

Project output:

3.-7. Juli 2018, ISGS 8, Kapstadt, Südafrika, The embodied nature of aspect – a cross-linguistic comparison of the cyclic gesture in English, Farsi, and German

Chapter “Grammaticaliztion in gestures” in Ladewig, Silva H. (2020). Integrating Gestures. The Dimension of Multimodality in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin/Amsterdam: De Gruyter Mouton