Transcript Current issues in sign language linguistics Day 1

Current issues
in sign language
linguistics
Day 5
LOT Summer School 2006
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Josep Quer (ICREA & UB)
Gesture vs. sign
• Gesticulation (Kendon 1980):
co-speech gesture
(spontaneous and unconscious)
• Different from pantomime and
emblems (conventionalized
gestures)
Gesture vs. sign
• McNeill (1992) categorization of
speaker’s gestures:
– Iconic: illustrate some concrete
aspect of the scene described
– Metaphoric: image of abstract
concepts and relationships referring
to discourse metastructures
– Beat: mark a word or phrase as
significant for its discoursepragmatic content
– Deictic: pointing gestures to objects
or events in the environment
Gesture vs. sign
Gesture vs. sign
Gesture vs. sign
• Signers do not produce
idiosyncratic, spontaneous
gestures while signing.
• Manual gestures produced as a
separate component of a
signed utterance: signers
stop signing while they
produce gesture.
Gesture vs. sign
Gesture vs. sign
• Unlike manual gestures, body and
facial gestures can be produced
simultaneously with signing.
• Speakers produce affective facial
expressions and other facial
expressions during narratives,
but much less frequently than
signers (e.g. Hearing vs. deaf
mothers telling stories to
children).
Gesture vs. sign
• Signers do not appear to produce
manual beat gestures with
metanarrative functions (maybe
change in rythmic stress or
nonmanuals with this function,
like headnod).
• Some characteristics:
– Alternate with linguistic signs
– More conventional and mimetic, rather
than idiosyncratic
– Not synchronized with a sign, rather
as component of an utterance or as
independent expressions
Gesture vs. sign
• Proposed functions of
cospeech gesture:
– Convey information to the
addressee (?: cf. Phone
conversation)
– Facilitate lexical retrieval
– Speech hesitations and repair
– Facilitate speech production
Gesture vs. sign
• Functions of gesture in
signers:
– Not linked to lexical retrieval
– Facilitative, communicative
Gesture in language
genesis
• Children “create” core properties
of language (Senghas et al. 2004)
• Example from Nicaraguan children:
hearing vs. deaf description of a
motion even
• Segmentation and recombination
(language) vs. holistic gestural
depiction
• http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/con
tent/full/305/5691/1779/DC1
Gesture in language
genesis
Gesture in language
evolution
• Gestural communication as a precursor
of (spoken) language (Armstrong,
Stokoe, Corballis).
• “Language would have been primarily
gestural, although increasingly
punctuated by vocalization (…). The
adaptations necessary for articulate
vocalization may have been selected,
not as a replacement for manual
gestures, but rather to augment them.
Some gestures were no doubt facial.”
(Corballis 2002: 216-217)
Gesture in language
evolution
Gesture in SL
acquisition
• Traditional view: discontinuity.
Gesture does not lead smoothly
into language.
• Evidence:
– U-shaped acquisition of purportedly
iconic aspects of grammar (pronouns,
agreement, nonmanuals)
– Failure to exploit iconicity in their
first signs
Gesture in SL
acquisition
• Negation (Anderson & Reilly
1997):
– Communicative headshake (1 year)
– Manual sign without nonmanual (18
months)
– Manual sign + nonmanual: 1 to 8
months later
Gesture in SL
acquisition
Gesture in SL
acquisition
• Continuity view for the
acquisition of spoken language:
important role of gesture leading
child into speech (Goldin-Meadow
& Butcher 2003)
• Speech-gesture combinations
predict onset of speech-only
strings: “eat”+POINT-to-cookie >
“eat cookie”
• Gesture signals readiness for 2word stage, but not beyond
Gesture without input
Homesigns
• Profoundly deaf children not
exposed to SL, only to
spontaneous gestures by their
parents: no conventional language
model.
• They develop homesign systems,
composed of pointing gestures and
iconic “characterizing gestures”
in systematic structure that is
consistent even across different
children in different cultures.
(Goldin-Meadow and colleagues)
Gesture without input
Homesigns
• “Ergative” pattern of gesture
ordering: intranstive actors
and patients pattern together
(vs. transitive actors).
– Intransitive actor + action
– Patient + action
– Action + transitive actor
(rare)
Gesture without input
Homesigns
http://www.psypress.co.uk/goldinmeadow/clips.asp
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Pronouns: in SLs, overt realization of
the referential index of pronouns.
• Verb agreement: similar but not
identical to literal alliterative
agreement > agreement with a location
associated with a referent, not with
the form of the controller itself. True
modality effect. Emergence of the
unmarked (default as the norm in SLs).
• Similarities: open-endedness and nonarbitrariness.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Constraints on the process of V
agreement are clearly linguistic.
• SLs employ the gestural spatial
medium in the manifestation of
their agreement systems.
• Non-first person singular SL
pronoun is lexically and
syntactically ambiguous, but
accompanied by a gesture, its
reference is disambiguated.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Simultaneity vs. sequentiality:
motivatedness results in
simultaneity of structure. The
propositions formed by words
involve events in which objects
and events, with their
concomitant qualities, etc.,
often coincide simultaneoulsy in
the real world.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Production/perception and
simultaneity: the hands are big
and slow, but they can articulate
HS, movement etc. simultaneoulsy;
two hands can articulate
independently.
• Processing: sign retained for a
shorter time in working memory >
more grammatical information must
be heaped simultaneously.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Spoken or signed ‘iconic’ word is
not an icon of what it is
representing, but rather is
motivated by some aspect of it
(appearance, sound, feeling,
spatial or temporal position...)
• Iconicity in spoken language:
onomatopoeia, ideophones/mimetics
(Japanese).
• Diagrammatic iconicity (e.g.
Order of clauses in discourse)
vs. lexical iconicity.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Sign recall tasks:
phonological substitutions,
not meaning substitutions.
• ASL diachronic study: From
iconic to arbitrary.
• CC also ruled by linguistic
principles. Componential
system.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Differences across SL lexicons: most
striking similarities not at lexical
level.
• Iconic vs. symbolic (abstract)
• Iconicity in morphological processes:
CC, agreement, reduplication.
• Motivatedness and phonology: Weak Drop
inhibition in iconically motivated
signs; anomalous HS and places of
articulation. Lexically specified.
Iconicity/Motivatedness
• Unlike spoken creoles: the
prototypical, productive, simultaneous
morphology of SL is also iconically
motivated (e.g. CC), while the more
affixal kind is not.
• As corporal-visual languages, SLs can
make extensive use of motivated
structure, so they do. In certain
respects, then, morphology is modalitydriven.
• Motivatedness and simultaneity offered
by the modality are exploited to create
complex morphology.