Following initial formal work on the semantic integration of gestures in discourse (e.g., Lascarides and Stone 2009) and on iconic aspects of gestural semantics (Giorgolo 2010), there has recently been a resurgence of interest in the formal and experimental semantics of co-speech gestures. It was motivated on three fronts: co-speech gestures have become crucial to understanding whether spoken language has means of iconic enrichment similar to those of sign language (Goldin-Meadow and Brentari 2017); co-speech gestures have become the topic of new debates in theoretical semantics, pertaining to their proper place in the inferential typology (Ebert and Ebert 2014, Schlenker 2018a); and experiments have been conducted to try to adjudicate these new debates (e.g., Tieu et al. 2017, 2018).
First, co-speech gestures became crucial to conducting a proper comparison between the semantics of signed and spoken languages. Iconic modulations (i.e.,...