Sebastian Walter

Invited presentations

2024

  • Perspektive in Sprache und Geste (Perspective in gesture and speech). Guest lecture in the seminar Perspektive in der Sprache (instructor: Stefan Hinterwimmer). Hamburg, Germany: University of Hamburg.
  • Indirect discourse as mixed quotation: Evidence from self pointing gestures. Presentation at MorphoSynSem Colloquium. Potsdam, Germany: University of Potsdam.

2023

  • At-issueness and salience differences between viewpoint gestures. Presentation at Bochum Language Colloquium. Bochum, Germany: Ruhr University Bochum.

Conference presentations

2025

  • Headnods don’t always mean ‘yes’: Ambiguity in gestural responses to negative questions (joint work with Lennart Fritzsche). Poster at AMLaP 2025, Prague, Czech Republic.
  • Pronoun interpretation in German speech reports (joint work with Yvonne Portele). Poster at AMLaP 2025, Prague, Czech Republic.
  • Nodding yes or doch? On the interpretation of gestural response elements (joint work with Lennart Fritzsche). Poster at LingCologne 2025, Cologne, Germany.
  • Interpreting pointing gestures: The role of direct and indirect speech (joint work with Cornelia Ebert, Lisa-Marie Krause, Stefan Hinterwimmer, and Oliver Herbort). Poster at Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP) 2025, Frankfurt, Germany.
  • Shifted face emoji in indirect discourse: A mixed-quotational approach (joint work with Stefan Hinterwimmer). Talk at the workshop Quotation unbound – Bridging the divide across quotation types at the Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Society 47, Mainz, Germany.

2024

  • Pronoun interpretation in German speech reports (joint work with Yvonne Portele). Talk at International Conference of Experimental Linguistics (ExLing) 15, Paris, France.
  • Can character viewpoint gestures guide pronoun resolution in German? (joint work with Noémi Ecsedi, Cornelia Ebert, and Kurt Erbach). Poster at International Conference of Experimental Linguistics (ExLing) 15, Paris, France.
  • Shifted face emoji in indirect discourse: A mixed-quotational approach (joint work with Stefan Hinterwimmer). Talk at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29, Noto, Italy.
  • Viewpoint matters: Prototypical vs. non-prototypical co-speech gestures in the VP domain (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Poster at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29, Noto, Italy.
  • Ideophones and reported speech: Depicting actions, events and speech (joint work with Kat Barnes). Talk at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29, Noto, Italy.
  • Differences in the at-issue status of viewpoint gestures: Inherent or QUD-dependent?. Talk at International Congress of Linguists (ICL) 21, Poznan, Poland.
  • An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Poster at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) 30, Edinburgh, UK.
  • Can face emoji receive a shifted interpretation in indirect discourse?. Poster at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) 30, Edinburgh, UK.
  • An experimental investigation of perspective alignment in gesture and speech (joint work with Stefan Hinterwimmer). Short talk at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 3, Philadelphia, PA.
  • Indirect discourse as mixed quotation: Evidence from self pointing gestures. Short talk at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 3, Philadelphia, PA.
  • Indirect discourse as mixed quotation: Evidence from self pointing gestures. Poster at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 34, Rochester, NY.

2023

  • Are there salience differences between viewpoint gestures? (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Poster at XPrag X, Paris, France.
  • The at-issue status of viewpoint gestures: Evidence for gradient at-issueness. Talk at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 28, Bochum, Germany.

2022

  • The (not-)at-issue status of character viewpoint gestures. Short talk at Linguistic Evidence (LE) 2022, Paris, France.

2020

  • The role of gesture-speech alignment for gesture interpretation (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Giovanna Pirillo). Poster at Linguistic Evidence (LE) 2020, Tübingen, Germany.

Workshop presentations

2025

  • Gesture modifications as event demonstrations: A formal analysis of iconic pro-speech gestures (joint work with Lennart Fritzsche). Talk at FLAMM 1, Dublin, Ireland.
  • Not a totally crazy proposal: Emblematic gestures as visual expressives. Talk at FLAMM 1, Dublin, Ireland.
  • Adding to the expressive typology: A formal analysis of emblematic gestures as visual expressives (joint work with Cornelia Ebert). Talk at EPITHETS & STAL-2025 Workshop, Genoa, Italy.
  • A demonstrational analysis of modified pro-speech gestures (joint work with Lennart Fritzsche). Talk at Dimensions of Iconicity in the Visual Modality, Göttingen, Germany.

2024

  • A crossmodal investigation of negation and rejection: Nod your head doch (joint work with Lennart Fritzsche). Talk at ViCom Annual Meeting 2024, Bad Homburg, Germany.
  • Viewpoint matters: Prototypical vs. non-prototypical co-speech gestures in the VP domain (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Talk at ViCom Annual Meeting 2024, Bad Homburg, Germany.
  • Multimodal response strategies to polar questions in German (joint work with Cornelia Ebert, Lennart Fritzsche, Wim Pouw, and Markus Steinbach). Talk at ViCom Workshop The Linguistic Status of Demonstrations, Königstein im Taunus, Germany.
  • Pointing in direct and indirect speech (joint work with Cornelia Ebert, Oliver Herbort, Stefan Hinterwimmer, and Lisa-Marie Krause). Talk at ViCom Workshop The Linguistic Status of Demonstrations, Königstein im Taunus, Germany.
  • Indirect discourse as mixed quotation: Evidence from self pointing gestures. Talk at ViCom Workshop The Linguistic Status of Demonstrations, Königstein im Taunus, Germany.

2023

  • Is there perspective alignment in gesture and speech? (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Talk at ViCom Annual Meeting 2023, Bad Homburg, Germany.
  • Pointing gestures in reported speech (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Talk at ViCom Theory Workshop 2023, Königstein im Taunus, Germany.

2022

  • Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language (joint work with Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer). Talk at ViCom Annual Meeting 2022, Bad Homburg, Germany.