Current issues in sign language linguistics Day 5

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Current issues in sign language
linguisticsDay 5

• LOT Summer School 2006
• Universiteit van Amsterdam
• Josep Quer (ICREA UB)

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Gesture vs. sign

• Gesticulation (Kendon 1980) co-speech gesture
  (spontaneous and unconscious)
• Different from pantomime and emblems
  (conventionalized gestures)

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Gesture vs. sign

• McNeill (1992) categorization of speakers
  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

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Gesture vs. sign
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Gesture vs. sign
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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.

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Gesture vs. sign
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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).

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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

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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

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Gesture vs. sign

• Functions of gesture in signers
• Not linked to lexical retrieval
• Facilitative, communicative

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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/305/569
  1/1779/DC1

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Gesture in language genesis
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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)

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Gesture in language evolution
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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

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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

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Gesture in SL acquisition
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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 eatPOINT-to-cookie gt eat
  cookie
• Gesture signals readiness for 2-word stage, but
  not beyond

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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)

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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)

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Gesture without inputHomesigns
http//www.psypress.co.uk/goldinmeadow/clips.asp
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Iconicity/Motivatedness

• Pronouns in SLs, overt realization of the
  referential index of pronouns.
• Verb agreement similar but not identical to
  literal alliterative agreement gt 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 gt more grammatical information
  must be heaped simultaneously.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.