In face-to-face interaction, speakers make multimodal contributions that exploit both the linguistic resources of spoken language and the visual and spatial affordances of gesture. In this paper, we argue that, in formulating and understanding such multimodal contributions, interlocutors apply the same principles of coherence that characterize the interpretation of natural language discourse. In particular, we use a close analysis of a series of naturally-occurring embodied discourses to argue for two key generalizations. First, communicators and their audiences draw on coherence relations (...) to establish interpretive connections between successive gestures and between gestures and speech. Second, coherence relations facilitate meaning-making by resolving the underspecified meaning of each communicative act through constrained inference over entities, propositions, and spatial frames made salient in the prior discourse. Our approach to gesture interpretation improves on previous work in better accounting for its flexibility, in capturing its constraints, and in laying the groundwork for formal and computational models. At the same time, it shows that gesture provides an important source of evidence to sharpen the theory of coherence relations and contextual resolution. (shrink)

Orthodox ideas of ownership tend to depict property as a private domain that expresses the owner?s formal rights. Yet equity does much to resist this outlook, deploying ethically-loaded ideas such as conscience and articulating an interpersonal and distinctly duty-driven character to property relations. Focusing on English case law, this article suggests that we can gather various strands of equitable property norms, particularly those derived from the constructive trust, around relationships of responsibility and vulnerability. Furthermore, the article asks what such equitable (...) ideas about property might therefore tell us about the purportedly possessive character of human subjectivity. Rather than constructing people as sovereign, autonomous proprietors, we might read equity as tracing an ethical quality to the way we perceive ourselves and others through property-related ideas. (shrink)

Jurisprudential debates on the place of law within the concept of anarchy are limited. Welack thorough arguments on whether law is negated by this concept, or whether anarchy requiressome kind of specific legal organisation. This article seeks to help enliven such discourse by exploring Emmanuel Levinas?s writings on the subject. Levinas?s account of anarchy as anirreducible and emancipatory ingredient of human subjectivity has the nuance capable of addressing the contradictions that dog any attempt to philosophise an anarchic account of the (...) law. Ultimately, it will be argued that Levinas allows us to think of anarchy not as requiring the expunging or co-optionof law, but as connected to law in a mode of perpetual ethical resistance. (shrink)