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.