Abstract

Most accounts of the semantic contribution of co-speech gestures posit that they contribute not-at-issue meaning by default (e. g., Ebert & Ebert 2014). This claim has been experimentally validated by Ebert, Ebert & Hörnig (2020) for gestures conveying information about an ob-ject’s size or shape. In this article, the findings from two rating studies are reported investigat-ing the at-issue status of character and observer viewpoint gestures (CVGs and OVGs, respec-tively, McNeill 1992). It is questionable whether the findings of Ebert, Ebert & Hörnig’s (2020) study hold equally strong for CVGs and OVGs, as especially the former gesture type differs in size from the gestures used in their study. The results of the studies suggest that while both gesture types contribute not-at-issue meaning by default, CVGs can shift more toward the at-issue dimension than OVGs if they provide information relevant to the question under discussion, in line with a gradient approach to at-issueness (Barnes & Ebert 2023).