Current issues in sign language linguistics Day 5

1. Current issues in sign language linguisticsDay 5 LOT Summer School 2006 Universiteit van Amsterdam Josep Quer (ICREA & UB)

2. Gesture vs. sign • Gesticulation (Kendon 1980): co-speech gesture (spontaneous and unconscious) • Different from pantomime and emblems (conventionalized gestures)

3. 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 discourse-pragmatic content • Deictic: pointing gestures to objects or events in the environment

4. Gesture vs. sign

5. Gesture vs. sign

6. 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.

7. Gesture vs. sign

8. 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).

9. 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

10. 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

11. Gesture vs. sign • Functions of gesture in signers: • Not linked to lexical retrieval • Facilitative, communicative

12. 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/content/full/305/5691/1779/DC1

13. Gesture in language genesis

14. 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)

15. Gesture in language evolution

16. 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

17. 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

18. Gesture in SL acquisition

19. 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 2-word stage, but not beyond

20. Gesture without inputHomesigns • 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)

21. Gesture without inputHomesigns • “Ergative” pattern of gesture ordering: intranstive actors and patients pattern together (vs. transitive actors). • Intransitive actor + action • Patient + action • Action + transitive actor (rare)

22. Gesture without inputHomesigns http://www.psypress.co.uk/goldinmeadow/clips.asp

23. 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 non-arbitrariness.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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 modality-driven. • Motivatedness and simultaneity offered by the modality are exploited to create complex morphology.