The Gradual Emergence of Phonological Form in a New Language
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Anastasia Bauer the Use of Signing Space in a Shared Signing Language of Australia Sign Language Typology 5
Anastasia Bauer The Use of Signing Space in a Shared Signing Language of Australia Sign Language Typology 5 Editors Marie Coppola Onno Crasborn Ulrike Zeshan Editorial board Sam Lutalo-Kiingi Irit Meir Ronice Müller de Quadros Roland Pfau Adam Schembri Gladys Tang Erin Wilkinson Jun Hui Yang De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press The Use of Signing Space in a Shared Sign Language of Australia by Anastasia Bauer De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press ISBN 978-1-61451-733-7 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-547-0 ISSN 2192-5186 e-ISSN 2192-5194 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2014 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin and Ishara Press, Lancaster, United Kingdom Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Țȍ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements This book is the revised and edited version of my doctoral dissertation that I defended at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne, Germany in January 2013. It is the result of many experiences I have encoun- tered from dozens of remarkable individuals who I wish to acknowledge. First of all, this study would have been simply impossible without its partici- pants. The data that form the basis of this book I owe entirely to my Yolngu family who taught me with patience and care about this wonderful Yolngu language. -
The Roots of Linguistic Organization in a New Language*
The roots of linguistic organization in a new language* Mark Aronoff1, Irit Meir2, Carol Padden3 and Wendy Sandler4 1Stony Brook University / 2University of Haifa / 3University of California San Diego / 4University of Haifa It is possible for a language to emerge with no direct linguistic history or outside linguistic influence. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) arose about 70 years ago in a small, insular community with a high incidence of profound pre- lingual neurosensory deafness. In ABSL, we have been able to identify the begin- nings of phonology, morphology, syntax, and prosody. The linguistic elements we find in ABSL are not exclusively holistic, nor are they all compositional, but a combination of both. We do not, however, find in ABSL certain features that have been posited as essential even for a proto-language. ABSL has a highly reg- ular syntax as well as word-internal compounding, also highly regular but quite distinct from syntax in its patterns. ABSL, however, has no discernable word-in- ternal structure of the kind observed in more mature sign languages: no spatially organized morphology and no evident duality of phonological patterning. Under the right conditions, it is possible for a language to emerge with no linguis- tic history. Because it arises spontaneously, unfettered by established structural convention, a language of this kind may reveal some of the most fundamental properties of human language. While all known spoken languages are either old or descended from old languages, sign languages used by deaf people do occasionally arise de novo when a number of deaf people are born into a community and, over time, have an opportunity to gather and communicate regularly.1 One cannot extrapolate directly from what we know about present-day new languages to protolanguage. -
Constraints on Metaphorical Extension of Iconic Forms
Iconicity and metaphor: Constraints on metaphorical extension of iconic forms Irit Meir Language, Volume 86, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 865-896 (Article) Published by Linguistic Society of America For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lan/summary/v086/86.4.meir.html Access Provided by Israel Institute of Technology at 01/03/11 3:53PM GMT ICONICITY AND METAPHOR: CONSTRAINTS ON METAPHORICAL EXTENSION OF ICONIC FORMS Irit Meir The University of Haifa Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target do- main in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are therefore subject to both mappings (Taub 2001). When the two mappings do not preserve the same structural correspon- dence, the metaphorical extension is blocked. This restriction is formulated as the DOUBLE- MAPPING CONSTRAINT, which requires multiple mappings to be structure-preserving. The effects of this constraint go beyond explaining possible and impossible metaphors in sign languages. Be- cause of the central role of metaphors in various linguistic processes, constraints on their occur- rence may affect other linguistic structures and processes that are built on these metaphors in both sign and spoken languages.* -
Meir, Irit, Carol Padden, Wendy Sandler
Journal of Linguistics http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN Additional services for Journal of Linguistics: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here Body as subject IRIT MEIR, CAROL A. PADDEN, MARK ARONOFF and WENDY SANDLER Journal of Linguistics / Volume 43 / Issue 03 / November 2007, pp 531 563 DOI: 10.1017/S0022226707004768, Published online: 22 October 2007 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226707004768 How to cite this article: IRIT MEIR, CAROL A. PADDEN, MARK ARONOFF and WENDY SANDLER (2007). Body as subject. Journal of Linguistics, 43, pp 531563 doi:10.1017/ S0022226707004768 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN, IP address: 129.49.23.145 on 09 May 2013 J. Linguistics 43 (2007), 531–563. f 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0022226707004768 Printed in the United Kingdom Body as subject1 IRIT MEIR Department of Hebrew Language and Department of Communication Disorders, The University of Haifa CAROL A. PADDEN Department of Communication, University of California at San Diego MARK ARONOFF Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University WENDY SANDLER Department of English Language and Literature, The University of Haifa (Received 19 January 2007; revised 10 May 2007) The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lex- icalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. -
Duality of Patterning: Absolute Universal Or Statistical Tendency?
DOI 10.1515/langcog-2012-0016 Language and Cognition 2012; 4(4): 275 – 296 1 Juliette Blevins 2 3 Duality of patterning: Absolute universal or 4 statistical tendency? 5 6 Abstract: As more of the world’s languages are described and compared, more 7 absolute universals have joined the class of statistical tendencies. However, few 8 have questioned the universality of the duality of patterning. Following Hockett, 9 most linguists assume that in all human languages, discrete meaningless parts 10 combine to form meaningful units that, themselves, recombine. However, an 11 alternative interpretation, explored in this article, is that duality, like other 12 proposed linguistic universals, is a statistical tendency reflecting a complex set 13 of factors, and most centrally, the need for some minimal number of basic units 14 that can recombine to yield a potentially infinite set of form-meaning correspon- 15 dences. If this is the essence of duality, then we expect: languages where duality 16 is not a central component of grammar; languages where most, but not all, utter- 17 ances are decomposable into meaningless phonological units; and different types 18 of phonological building blocks in different languages. These expectations ap- 19 pear to be confirmed by natural language data. 20 21 Keywords: duality of patterning, language universals, statistical tendencies, pho- 22 nology, Charles F. Hockett 23 24 25 Juliette Blevins: Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, 26 NY 10016, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 27 28 29 30 31 1 Linguistic universals as statistical tendencies 32 33 Absolute universals are properties that all languages share. -
Person Vs Spatial Agreement Final Revision
Person vs. locative agreement: Evidence from late learners and language emergence Lily Kwok, Stephanie Berk, Diane Lillo-Martin University of Connecticut Abstract Sign languages are frequently described as having three verb classes. One, ‘agreeing’ verbs, indicates the person/number of its subject and object by modification of the beginning and ending locations of the verb. The second, ‘spatial’ verbs, makes a similar appearing modification of verb movement to represent the source and goal locations of the theme of a verb of motion. The third class, ‘plain’ verbs, is characterized as having neither of these types of modulations. A number of researchers have proposed accounts that collapse all of these types, or the person-agreeing and spatial verbs. Here we present evidence from late learners of American Sign Language and from the emergence of new sign languages that person agreement and locative agreement have a different status in these conditions and we claim their analysis should be kept distinct, at least in certain ways. Keywords Verb agreement Language development Delayed first language Language emergence Sign languages 1 1 Introduction: Verb classes in sign languages In very many sign languages, a subset of verbs can be modified in ways that some researchers have analyzed as a kind of verb agreement. Verbs that allow for this kind of modification use locations in the signing space (‘loci’) in a particular way, as described below. First, the loci have to be associated with a referent, either because the referent is physically present in the signing situation (present referents) or because the signer has indicated that a particular locus will be used to stand for a referent (non-present referents). -
The Framework of Language
© 1980 by Roman Jakobson CONTENTS Michigan Studies in the Humanities VI Horace H. Rackham School ofGraduate Studies Preface Introduction (by Ladislav Matejka) vii Board ofEditors A Glance at the Development of Semiotics Richard Bailey (English), Judith Becker (Music), Arthur Burks (Philosophy), Oscar Blide! (Italian), Vern Carroll (Anthropology), A Few Remarks on Peirce, Herbert Eagle (Film), Emery George (German), Floyd Gray (French), Pathfinder in the Science of Language 31 D. Kirkpatrick (History of Art), Ladislav Matejka (SlaVic), Walter Mignolo (Spanish), Eric Rabkin (American Studies), G. Rosenwald Glosses on the Medieval Insight (psychology), lngo Seidler (German), Gernot Windfuhr (Near into the Science of Language 39 Eastern Studies). The Twentieth Century in European and American Linguistics: Movements and Continuity 61 Irwin R. Titunik,Associate Editor Ladislav Matejka, Managing Editor Metalanguage as a Linguistic Problem 81 On Aphasic Disorders from a Linguistic Angle 93 library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data On the Linguistic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness and the Unconscious 113 Jakobson, Roman, 1896- The framework of language. (Michigan studies in the humanities; no. 1) Includes bibliography. 1. Linguistics-Collected works. I. Title. II. Series. P27J338 410 80-13842 ISBN 0-936534-00-1 PREFACE INTRODUCTION With this volume ,Michigan Studies in the Humanities inaugurates The ever expanding bibliography of Roman Jakobson's contribu a series of books designed to promote cooperation among the various tions to the humanities recently prompted an editor of one of the branches of the humanities by presenting perspectives on traditional numerous Festschrifts in Jakobson's honor to dub him a "polyhistor," 1 problems of interpretation and evaluation. -
The Evolution of Verb Classes and Verb Agreement in Sign Languages
DOI 10.1515/tl-2012-0008 Theoretical Linguistics 2012; 38(1-2): 145 – 152 Irit Meir The evolution of verb classes and verb agreement in sign languages Irit Meir: Department of Hebrew Language, University of Haifa, Mt. Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel. E-mail: [email protected] Sign languages offer the possibility of raising and examining many issues that would not and could not be raised if human languages were confined to the spo- ken modality. One central issue concerns the relationship between language structure and modality: how and in what ways does the physical modality of transmission influence structure? In order to attempt to investigate this question in a meaningful way, one must look for specific phenomena or structures that are comparable across modalities yet differ in significant ways. Verb agreement is precisely such a phenomenon. Verb agreement in sign l anguages seems to be very similar and at the same time very different from com- parable constructions in spoken languages. Weighing the similarities and differ- ences led Lillo-Martin and Meier (henceforth LM&M) to the conclusion that direc- tionality, the formational expression of phi-feature marking in sign languages, can indeed be regarded as a verb agreement mechanism, a conclusion that I agree with wholeheartedly. LM&M, however, do not ignore the differences. In section 6.1 they describe some features of directionality in sign language verbs which makes sign languages typologically unique. Among these features are the specific classification of verbs into agreeing verbs, spatial verbs and plain verbs; the pri- macy of object agreement over subject agreement; and the ubiquity of this non- canonical system in sign languages. -
Phonetic and Phonological Distinctions in Sign Languages
Crasborn, van der Hulst & van der Kooij: Introduction article 1 Phonetic and phonological distinctions in sign languages Onno Crasborn Harry van der Hulst Els van de Kooij Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics (HIL) Intersign Introduction Chapter (draft), January 28, 2000 1. Introduction In designing a phonological model we do not, as in the case of spoken language, have the advantage of being able to rely on a long tradition of proposals for feature sets and higher constructs. If linguistics is a young (and, some would say, immature) discipline, than sign linguistics has just been born. It essentially started in 1960 with the publication of Stokoe (1960), anticipated by earlier work that recognized the linguistic, communicative status of signing (for example Tervoort 1953). As might be expected from explorative proposals for feature sets, there has been a strong focus on the great richness of phonetic diversity of signs, and much less on phonological distinctiveness. As a consequence, most proposals for feature sets involve rather large sets of features, minutely encoding many phonetic details, and giving the impression that the feature structure of signed languages is much richer than that of spoken languages. Having said this, we do not wish to underestimate the enormous advances that have been made in the short period of 40 years by a relatively small group of linguists. In the early seventies we find foundational work in Klima and Bellugi (1973), reflecting the research of a group of influential researchers. In addition, several very detailed dissertations on the phonology of American Sign Language (ASL) appeared around that time, and throughout the eighties (for example Friedman 1976, Mandel 1981, Battison 1978, Sandler 1989; for overviews see Wilbur 1987). -
(Accepted). Taking Meaning in Hand: Iconic Motivations in Two-Handed Signs
Lepic, Ryan, Carl Börstell, Gal Belsitzman, and Wendy Sandler. (Accepted). Taking meaning in hand: Iconic motivations in two-handed signs. Sign Language and Linguistics. (36 pages) Iconicity in two-handed signs 1 Title: Taking meaning in hand: iconic motivations in two-handed signs Authors' names and affiliations: Ryan Lepic1*, Carl Börstell2, Gal Belsitzman3, Wendy Sandler3 1 Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, USA 2 Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 3 Sign Language Research Laboratory, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Abstract (150): Traditionally in sign language research, the issue of whether a lexical sign is articulated with one hand or two has been treated as a strictly phonological matter. We argue that accounting for two-handed signs also requires considering meaning as a motivating factor. We report results from a Swadesh list comparison, an analysis of semantic patterns among two-handed signs, and a picture-naming task. Comparing four unrelated languages, we demonstrate that the two hands are recruited to encode various relationship types in sign language lexicons. We develop the general principle that inherently "plural" concepts are straightforwardly mapped onto our paired human hands, resulting in systematic use of the two hands across sign languages. In our analysis, "plurality" subsumes four primary relationship types – interaction, location, dimension, and composition – and we predict that signs with meanings that encompass these relationships – such as 'meet', 'empty', 'large', or 'machine' – will preferentially be two- handed in any sign language. Keywords (7): iconicity, lexical patterns, two-handed signs, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), American Sign Language (ASL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), Swedish Sign Language (SSL) Text: 1. -
Wit and Humor in ASL Keila Tooley Eastern Illinois University This Research Is a Product of the Graduate Program in English at Eastern Illinois University
Eastern Illinois University The Keep Masters Theses Student Theses & Publications 1986 Wit and Humor in ASL Keila Tooley Eastern Illinois University This research is a product of the graduate program in English at Eastern Illinois University. Find out more about the program. Recommended Citation Tooley, Keila, "Wit and Humor in ASL" (1986). Masters Theses. 2678. https://thekeep.eiu.edu/theses/2678 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses & Publications at The Keep. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of The Keep. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THESIS REPRODUCTION CERTIFICATE TO: Graduate Degree Candidates who have written formal theses. SUBJECT: Permission to reproduce theses. The University Library is receiving a number of requests from other institutions asking permission to reproduce dissertations for inclusion in their library holdings. Although no copyright laws are involved, we feel that professional courtesy demands that permission be obtained from the author before we allow theses to be copied. Please sign one of the following statements: Booth Library of Eastern Illinois University has my permission to lend my thesis to a reputable college or university for the purpose of copying it for inclusion in that institution's library or research holdings. Date Author I respectfully request Booth Library of Eastern Illinois University not allow my thesis be reproduced because �--�� Date m WIT AND HUMOR IN ASL (TITLE) BY Keila Tooley THESIS -
REACTIVE EFFORT AS a FACTOR THAT SHAPES SIGN LANGUAGE LEXICONS Nathan Sanders Donna Jo Napoli
REACTIVE EFFORT AS A FACTOR THAT SHAPES SIGN LANGUAGE LEXICONS Nathan Sanders Donna Jo Napoli Swarthmore College Swarthmore College Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon . Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call reactive effort : the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed to resist incidental twisting and rocking of the torso induced by path movement of the manual articulators in sign lan - guages. We argue that, as part of a general linguistic drive to reduce articulatory effort, reactive ef - fort should have a significant effect on the relative frequency in the lexicon of certain types of path movements. We support this argument with evidence from Italian Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, evidence that cannot be explained solely by appeal to constraints on bimanual coordination . As the first exploration of the linguistic role of re - active effort, this work contributes not only to the developing field of sign language phonetics, but also to our understanding of phonetics in general , adding to a growing body of functionalist liter - ature showing that some linguistic patterns emerge from more fundamental factors of the physical world.