Sebastian Walter

Sebastian Walter

ResearchGate
OSF

Postdoctoral researcher, Goethe University Frankfurt

Hi!

I’m a postdoc focusing on formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics at Goethe University Frankfurt at the chair of semantics. Specifically, I work in a DFG-funded ViCom project called Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language (PIs: Cornelia Ebert (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Hamburg)). I am thus especially interested in interactions of perspective taking in speech and speech-accompanying gestures. In my PhD thesis, I investigated the interactions of perspective-taking in gesture and speech, with a focus on the cross-modal architecture of perspective-taking, the dynamics of multiperspectivity in multimodal language, and the role of perspective in the interpretation of iconic gestures. To this end, I integrated insights from several experimental studies into formal-semantic analyses of these phenomena.

Besides my research interest in the expression of perspective across different modalities in language, I am also interested in topics such as gesture semantics, at-issueness, expressivity, modals, and multimodal response strategies.

Recent and upcoming presentations

  • September 2026: Event kind vs. event token interpretations of iconic gestures in the VP domain (joint work with Cornelia Ebert, Daniel Teich & Stefan Hinterwimmer). Poster at XPrag.it 6, Genoa, Italy.
  • September 2026: At-issue and non-at-issue contributions of emoji: Evidence from contrastive inferences (joint work with Lyn Tieu, Selina Zheng & Natalia Liu). Poster at XPrag.it 6, Genoa, Italy.
  • September 2026: Task sensitivity in German pronoun interpretation in direct discourse: The role of memory (joint work with Yvonne Portele). Poster at XPrag.it 6, Genoa, Italy.
  • September 2026:  Investigating contrastive inference generation across speech and gesture. Talk at SemDial 30, Loughborough, United Kingdom.
  • September 2026: When are speakers committed to their gestures? Insights from deceptive communication (joint work with Jonas Hartke). Talk at SemDial 30, Loughborough, United Kingdom.
  • September 2026: Investigating depictive and symbolic uses of emoji through contrastive inferences (joint work with Lyn Tieu, Selina Zheng & Natalia Liu). Poster at Sinn und Bedeutung 31, Nantes, France.
  • July 2026: Shifted interpretation of pointing gestures in speech reports (joint work with Oliver Herbort, Cornelia Ebert, Lisa-Marie Nehfischer & Stefan Hinterwimmer). Poster at CogSci 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
  • June 2026: Investigating contrastive inferences in emoji (joint work with Lyn Tieu, Selina Zheng & Natalia Liu). Talk at Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association 73, Calgary, Canada.
  • June 2026: Measuring commitment in iconic gesture: The role of (not-)at-issueness (joint work with Jonas Hartke). Talk at Measuring Commitments in Communication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
  • June 2026: Testing the tests: A re-evaluation of at-issueness diagnostics across modalities (joint work with Lennart Fritzsche). Short talk (online) at ELM 4, Philadelphia, PA, USA.