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NEVEU-DISSERTATION-2019.Pdf Copyright by Grace Kathleen Neveu 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Grace Kathleen Neveu certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Lexical Conventionalization and the Emergence of Grammatical Devices in a Second Generation Homesign System in Peru Committee: Richard P. Meier, Supervisor David Quinto-Pozos Danny Law Patience Epps J¨urgenStreek Lexical Conventionalization and the Emergence of Grammatical Devices in a Second Generation Homesign System in Peru by Grace Kathleen Neveu DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN August 2019 To my family and the M´a´ıj`un`a. Acknowledgments Graduate school requires an extensive network of support both aca- demic and personal. No dissertation is complete without a lengthy acknowl- edgements section. I thank my parents, brother and sister, whose support throughout my entire academic career has led to this accomplishment. I am grateful to have parents who nurtured intellectual curiosity from a young age. I have known I wanted to get a PhD in linguistics since I was fifteen years old. The friendships I made at UT were invaluable to my experience. Laura, Mike, Mackenzie, Paige Erin and Meg, playing WoD with you helped me get through the toughest period of a PhD program. I owe my thanks to the fencing team as well. My teammates were among the first friends I made at UT and having practice at the end of the day was always a motivator to finish up my work. In particular, I thank Megan, Julia, Marigold, Lara, Sonya (Angel), Suraya (Hair Flip), Pooja (Shrimpo), Jack, Henri and Jost. Our car ride discussions were as engaging as those I had in the lab. Vanessa, thank you for listening to all my graduate school woes from afar. Thank you to Glenavin, for the late nights and cafe company. This work would not have been possible without the contributions of those in the UT Sign Language Lab. Many ideas and versions of this disserta- tion were presented to the professors and students who makeup our research v group. Their questions and feedback challenged me and no doubt resulted in a better final product. Thank you to Kate, Justin, Lina, Frances, Conni, Elena, Ryan, Dag, Caitie and Austin. I also thank those scholars outside of UT who have influenced this work with their ideas and discussions. Laura Horton and Sara Goico, our extensive discussions about homesign systems allowed me to think about my data in new ways. I was fortunate to be at a university with such strong programs in documentary linguistics and sign language linguistics. Thank you to all of the professors, in particular Pattie Epps, your course in typology was one of the first I took at UT and it was fantastic, Danny Law, you shaped my ideas about iconicity, and J¨urgenStreeck, thank you for challenging my ideas about visual communication. Thank you especially to David Quinto-Pozos, whose feedback and suggestions shaped many crucial parts of this dissertation. Finally, thank you to my advisor, Richard Meier. I am so lucky to have had such a patient, kind and talented professor and person guiding me through this entire process. None of this would have happened without Professor Lev Michael, who first brought me to Nueva Vida as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. It was with Lev that I learned the ins and outs of fieldwork and documentation. Thank you, as well, to Chris Beier. Fieldwork in Nueva Vida isn't the same without field pancakes. Thank you to the tireless staff of the linguistics department, who helped navigate the difficult, but necessary, aspects of academia, such as grants and endless paperwork. Ben, even when I came to you with problems that weren't vi in your job description, you always knew where I needed to go. Thank you Leslie, Gabby, Liz and Marina. The department would not function without you. I reserve my final thanks for the M´a´ıj`un`acommunity. This disserta- tion would not have been possible without their willingness to allow my into their community and homes. Thank you to my consultants, who shared their languages with me over these many years. I am indebted to my host family in Totoya, who took care of me when I became extremely ill in the field. My time with the M´ai´ıj`un`awill shape the entirety of my life. This dissertation was supported by a Tinker Field Summer Research Grant, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Im- provement Grant (BCS-1551691), a National Institutes of Health Predoctoral Fellowship (F31DC01537902) and a Pan American Round Tabes of Texas Flo- rence T. Griswold Scholarship. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. vii Lexical Conventionalization and the Emergence of Grammatical Devices in a Second Generation Homesign System in Peru Publication No. Grace Kathleen Neveu, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Richard P. Meier This dissertation is the study of a sign system used by the M´a´ıj`un`a, an indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon. The properties of the signing community are not characteristic of either a prototypical homesigning community or a village sign language. The signing community consists of two deaf individuals (RCM and ST) and their hearing friends and family. The socio-cultural features of this sign system, which fall between that of a homesign system and a village sign language, can inform us of how community structure and the interaction between hearing and deaf signers affect language emergence. This question is explore through a grammatical analysis of RCM's system and a lexical analysis of both RCM's and ST's systems. There are two main goals of this dissertation: 1) To describe the grammatical and lexical features of the sign system and 2) To explore how the socio-cultural features viii of the community contribute to the emergence and maintenance of the sign system. These goals were approached through a variety of data collection meth- ods. To describe the grammar and the lexicon, both traditional elicitation methods and conversational data were used to support findings. The gram- matical analysis focussed on argument structure and use of grammatical space in RCM's system. RCM did not produce consistent word order to mark argu- ments, but he did consistently use spatial modulation for this purpose. The elicitation analysis was supported by the conversational data, showing that this was not a product of the elicitation method. Data from hearing signers in the community were also analyzed. They produced highly consistent word order, but their productions of spatial modulation were less sophisticated than those of RCM, suggesting that RCM innovated the grammatical structure in his system. The analysis of the lexicon includes detailed assessments of form and consistency between RCM and ST. An in-depth analysis of the consistency between the deaf signers and the hearing signers in the two communities was completed. Through this analysis, additional features of the lexicon are dis- cussed, such as semantic extensions and the role of iconicity in sign form. It was found that, despite living in different villages and having only sporadic contact with each other, RCM and ST were highly consistent with each other and the hearing signers in both villages. These results were then investigated further by exploring the possible shared influences between RCM and ST in ix order to account for the high lexical consistency. Three experiments were con- ducted on iconicity, gesture and the lexicons of unrelated homesigners. These experiments showed that only a small portion of RCM's and ST's shared lex- icon is likely due to these shared influences. The results suggest, then, that the two are signers of a single, multi-generation homesign system, rather than two separate homesign systems. x Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Abstract viii List of Tables xvi List of Figures xix Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Theoretical Implications . .3 1.1.1 Language Development without a Language Model . .3 1.1.2 Language Development with an Impoverished Language Model . .8 1.1.3 The Effect of Community Structure on Language Emer- gence . 10 1.1.3.1 Grammatical Space and Directionality . 11 1.1.3.2 Sub-lexical Structure and Lexical variation . 12 1.1.3.3 Socio-cultural Factors . 14 1.2 Fieldwork and Data Collection . 17 1.3 Overview and Goals . 20 Chapter 2. Community Background and Discussion of Ideolo- gies Associated with Signed Communication 24 2.1 Introduction . 24 2.2 The M´a´ıj`un`a. 27 2.2.1 Characteristics of the M´a´ıj`un`aSigning Community . 33 2.2.1.1 Size of community . 34 2.2.1.2 Age of language . 34 2.2.1.3 Distribution of deaf people . 35 xi 2.2.1.4 Social status of deaf people . 35 2.2.1.5 Exposure to other sign languages . 36 2.3 Participants . 36 2.4 Deafness and Ideologies in the M´a´ıj`un`aCommunity . 38 2.4.1 History and Perception of Deafness . 38 2.4.2 Individual Ideologies . 45 2.4.2.1 Corrections and Standards of Well-Formedness . 46 2.4.2.2 Simultaneous Communication and Mouthing . 47 2.4.2.3 Clarification . 50 2.4.2.4 Summary . 56 2.5 Culture of Gesture Use . 58 2.6 Summary . 60 Chapter 3. Argument Structure through Word Order and Spa- tial Modulation 62 3.1 Introduction .
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