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Negation, Questions, and Structure Building in a Homesign System

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Negation, Questions, and Structure Building in a Homesign System Cognition 118 (2011) 398–416 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT Negation, questions, and structure building in a homesign system a, b c Amy Franklin ⇑, Anastasia Giannakidou , Susan Goldin-Meadow a University of Texas Health Science Center Houston, School of Biomedical Informatics, Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making, 7000 Fannin Suite, 600 Houston, Tx 77030, United States b University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th St.Chicago, IL 60637, United States c University of Chicago, Departments of Psychology and Human Development, 5730 S. Woodlawn Ave. Chicago, IL 60637, United States article info abstract Article history: Deaf children whose hearing losses are so severe that they cannot acquire spoken language, Received 13 October 2009 and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use gestures called Revised 9 August 2010 homesigns to communicate. Homesigns have been shown to contain many of the properties Accepted 27 August 2010 of natural languages. Here we ask whether homesign has structure building devices for Available online 19 November 2010 negation and questions. We identify two meanings (negation, question) that correspond semantically to propositional functions, that is, to functions that apply to a sentence Keywords: (whose semantic value is a proposition, /) and yield another proposition that is more com- Negation plex ( for negation; ? for question). Combining with or ? thus involves sentence Questions q/ / / q Language development modification. We propose that these negative and question functions are structure building Sign language operators, and we support this claim with data from an American homesigner. We show Home sign that: (a) each meaning is marked by a particular form in the child’s gesture system Gesture (side-to-side headshake for negation, manual flip for question); (b) the two markers occupy Language creation systematic, and different, positions at the periphery of the gesture sentences (headshake at Sentence modification the beginning, flip at the end); and (c) the flip is extended from questions to other uses Free relatives associated with the wh-form (exclamatives, referential expressions of location) and thus Wh-forms functions like a category in natural languages. If what we see in homesign is a language cre- Nonveridicality Structure building ation process (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), and if negation and question formation involve sen- tential modification, then our analysis implies that homesign has at least this minimal sentential syntax. Our findings thus contribute to ongoing debates about properties that are fundamental to language and language learning. Ó 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction (Goldin-Meadow, Mylander, & Butcher, 1995; Goldin- Meadow, Mylander, & Franklin, 2007) and syntactic Homesign systems are gesture systems created by deaf (Feldman, Goldin-Meadow, & Gleitman, 1978; Goldin- children whose hearing losses are so severe that they can- Meadow, 2003) structures (e.g., operations that combine not acquire the spoken language that surrounds them, and verbs with their arguments, Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign lan- 1998). The properties that are found in homesign do not guage—in other words, gesture systems created in the ab- need to be handed down from generation to generation sence of a conventional language model. Despite the lack of but can be invented de novo by a child. conventional linguistic input, the homesigns that deaf chil- Interestingly, it is likely that many, if not all, current day dren create in these circumstances exhibit many proper- sign languages have their roots in a home sign system. We ties of natural languages, including morphological can, for example, trace the birth of the newly emerging Nicaraguan Sign Language to the period when home sign- Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 713 500 3670; fax: +1 713 500 3900. ers were brought together for the first time (Kegl, Senghas, ⇑ E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Franklin). & Coppola, 1999; see also Sandler, Meir, Padden, & Aronoff, 0010-0277/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.017 A. Franklin et al. / Cognition 118 (2011) 398–416 399 2005, who describe the birth of another newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language). Home (1) Did Bob see a snake? sign systems thus present a unique opportunity to observe and analyze the language creation process, with the poten- The speaker does not know whether Bob saw a snake, tial to offer us important insight into what is fundamental which is why she is asking the question. This state of about language. uncertainty is known as nonveridicality (see Montague, The debate about what is fundamental to language lies 1969, and more recently, Giannakidou, 1998, 1999; Zwarts, at the heart of current linguistic theory and psychological 1995): a proposition embedding function F is nonveridical studies of language. One influential position, assumed by if the sentence Fu does not entail the truth of the proposi- many in the field of linguistics (see, for example, Nevins, tion u. As is obvious, the antiveridicality of negation makes Pesetsky, & Rodrigues, 2009) is that recursion constitutes it nonveridical. Just like negation, the question operator is a basic property of language (Chomsky, Hauser, & Fitch, also assumed to reside in a sentence peripheral position— 2002; Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005). In current terms e.g., the complementizer position, which is a bit higher (Chomsky, 1995), recursion can be understood as the prop- than negation and associated with illocutionary force (see erty that creates constituents via Merge, or, in different sys- discussion below and in Section 5). In some languages, tems, syntactic phrase structure rules that combine any the question operator is realized by special morphemes two or more linguistic items to create a new one. Recursion such as li in Serbian/Croatian (Progovac, 1994), and similar is involved in sentence modification (when a proposition is items in languages as diverse as Arabic, Caddo, and Chinese modified by a sentential operation involving, for example, (Cheng, Cheng, & Tang, 1996). In some languages, there is a negation, tense, questions, or modals) and in sentence common morphological source between negation and complementation (when a verb takes a sentence as its question operators, e.g., transition points in a language’s complement, e.g., Bob believes that Bill said that Mary thinks history where the negation marker provides the basis for that Amy is sick). the morphological formation of the question marker, or In the present work, we examine utterances produced by even concurrent uses of negation as the question marker a homesigner, whom we call David, that are nonveridical (Cheng et al., 1996). (Giannakidou, 1998, 1999; Zwarts, 1995); specifically, we We illustrate below the proposition embedding prop- erty of negation and questions; stands for a sentence, examine utterances that convey negative or question mean- u q ing. Our focus on nonveridical utterances provides evidence for negation, and ? for the question operator; ‘‘?” indicates for two structure building operations in homesign systems: the mapping from input to output: one for negation, and one for question formation, two lan- guage properties that have not previously been demon- (2) Negation: strated to arise in the context of homesign. We begin with u ? qu the background on nonveridicality and sentence modifica- Question: u ? ?u tion necessary to understand the claim that the two mean- ing markers developed by the homesigner we have studied (a side-to-side headshake for negation, and a manual flip Negation does not affect the speech act of the utterance: if is an assertion, then so is . The question operator, on for questions) are part of a sentence building process. u qu the other hand, alters the speech act, i.e., it adds the illocu- 2. Sentence modification: negation and questions tionary force (Searle, 1969) of a question. If u is an asser- tion, ?u is a question. We will have more to say about Negation is one of the most basic ways to build a com- the meaning of a question in Section 5. plex sentence out of a basic one: in the logical syntax, the We argue that the homesign system we studied pos- logical connective takes a sentence (or a proposition) as sesses lexical items corresponding to and ?, and that, in q q its input, and gives back a new sentence while reversing employing them, the system applies syntactic modifica- the truth value of the original. The natural language words tions of the kind just described. no, didn’t, not in English, and their counterparts in other languages, convey logical, truth functional, negation (see 3. Method Horn, 1989, for extensive discussion of the properties of logical negation and its mapping onto natural language 3.1. Participant negation) and can thus be called (sentential) negation markers. Negation markers have been argued to have a Deaf children born to deaf parents and exposed from syntax that is consistent with their sentence embedding birth to a conventional sign language acquire that language function, that is, they tend to appear in peripheral posi- naturally; that is, these children progress through stages in tions, sentence initial or VP peripheral (we will have more acquiring a sign language similar to those of hearing chil- to say about this point in Section 4). The truth reversal dren acquiring a spoken language (Lillo-Martin, 1999; property of negation is identified as antiveridicality in Newport & Meier, 1985). However, 90% of deaf children Giannakidou (1998). are not born to deaf parents who could provide early expo- A question, on the other hand, is a request for informa- sure to a conventional sign language. Rather, they are born tion. When a speaker asks a question, she is in a state of to hearing parents who naturally expose their children to uncertainty and lacks knowledge of the answer to the speech (Hoffmeister & Wilbur, 1980).
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