Sign Language Typology Series

SIGN LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY SERIES The Sign Language Typology Series is dedicated to the comparative study of sign languages around the world. Individual or collective works that systematically explore typological variation across sign languages are the focus of this series, with particular emphasis on undocumented, underdescribed and endangered sign languages. The scope of the series primarily includes cross-linguistic studies of grammatical domains across a larger or smaller sample of sign languages, but also encompasses the study of individual sign languages from a typological perspective and comparison between signed and spoken languages in terms of language modality, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to sign language typology. Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Languages Edited by Ulrike Zeshan Sign Language Typology Series No. 1 / Interrogative and negative constructions in sign languages / Ulrike Zeshan (ed.) / Nijmegen: Ishara Press 2006. ISBN-10: 90-8656-001-6 ISBN-13: 978-90-8656-001-1 © Ishara Press Stichting DEF Wundtlaan 1 6525XD Nijmegen The Netherlands Fax: +31-24-3521213 email: [email protected] <a href="/goto?url=http://ishara.def-intl.org" target="_blank">http://ishara.def-intl.org </a>Cover design: Sibaji Panda Printed in the Netherlands First published 2006 Catalogue copy of this book available at Depot van Nederlandse Publicaties, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag (www.kb.nl/depot) To the deaf pioneers in developing countries who have inspired all my work Contents Preface........................................................................................................10 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Part I </li><li style="flex:1">Introduction </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">1</li><li style="flex:1">Design of the volume.........................................................................13 </li></ul>Ulrike Zeshan <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">2</li><li style="flex:1">Negative and interrogative constructions in sign languages: A case </li></ul>study in sign language typology........................................................28 Ulrike Zeshan <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Part II </li><li style="flex:1">Studies of negatives and interrogatives </li></ul>in individual sign languages 345 Aspects of interrogatives and negation in New Zealand Sign Language...........................................................................................70 Rachel McKee Interrogatives and negatives in Japanese Sign Language (JSL)..................................................................................................91 Michael W . M organ Negative and interrogative structures in Turkish Sign Language (TID) ..............................................................................................128 Ulrike Zeshan 67 Questions and negation in American Sign Language.....................165 Susan D. Fischer Questions and negation in Hong Kong Sign Language.........................................................................................198 Gladys T a ng <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">8</li><li style="flex:1">Interrogatives and negatives in Flemish Sign </li></ul>Language.........................................................................................225 Mieke van Herreweghe & Myriam V e rmeerbergen <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Part III </li><li style="flex:1">Flashes from around the world </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">9</li><li style="flex:1">The use of negative head movements in Greek Sign </li></ul>Language.........................................................................................258 Klimis Antzakas 10 Questions in Brazilian Sign Language (LSB).................................270 Ronice Müller de Quadros 11 Interrogatives and negatives in Finnish Sign Language: An overview..........................................................................................284 Leena Savolainen 12 Regional variation in Indo-Pakistani Sign Language - Evidence from content questions and negatives......................................................303 Ulrike Zeshan Appendix Transcription conventions.........................................................................324 Research materials....................................................................................326 Subject index............................................................................................350 References................................................................................................357 Preface During fieldwork in Lebanon in November 2001, I was staying with my husband and my son at the guesthouse of the German Oriental Institute in Beirut. One day I met the director of the institute, who had come up to the general living area to check on the newly acquired television. We started talking about sign languages and deaf communities, and, becoming more and more surprised at all the strange facts I was bringing to his notice, he summed up our discussion with the words: “I only came to find a new television, but I found a whole new world!”. Since 1994, my work in the world of deaf communities in various countries has brought with it a constant stream of memorable moments. A nightly journey in 1998 on a bicycle-rickshaw through a quarter of the old city in Delhi to visit a deaf family, in almost total darkness due to one of the usual electricity cuts. The first Indian conference on bilingualism in deaf education in Hyderabad in 2001. A long evening in Eskişehir learning the local games of chance in the deaf club together with some of my first Turkish signs. A week trapped in snowstorms in the worst Istanbul winter in decades, and severe Monsoon floodings in Mumbai. And above all, the long nights of relentless and addictive signing. Working in developing countries means working under the constant strain of insufficient resources and, at times, personal hardship, but more often than not, this is counterbalanced by the amazing human resources to be found in the deaf communities themselves. I gratefully acknowledge that they have been my main source of inspiration, and so it is to them that I wish to dedicate this volume. On the academic side, I am no less grateful to the many people who have accompanied me on various stages of the journey towards the beginnings of sign language typology. I owe a lot to the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) in Australia, which was my host institution in Canberra and in Melbourne between 1999 and 2003. The framework for a large cross-linguistic study on negatives and interrogatives in sign languages, which has resulted in the present volume, first took shape at the RCLT. The subsequent development of the project is something that still surprises me. Having designed questionnaires and contacted possible collaborators around the world, the sensible expectation, which luckily I was not aware of at the time, would have been to get some basic information from a handful of respondents, if not less. Instead, I received responses for sign languages from 18 countries, varying from a few basic written answers to complete 20-page papers. More often than not, the responses also included pictures or videotapes, and the amount of effort that went into preparing all these resources was truly impressive. A project of this kind would have been impossible without the support of these dedicated collaborators, and so I would like to express my deep gratitude to the people who were part of this unique group effort: Trevor Johnston (Australia), Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen (Denmark), Leena Savolainen, Pia Koivula, Kimmo Leinonen, Kaisa Engman, Karin Hoyer, Anja Malm, and Ritva Takkinen (Finland), Klimis Antzakas (Greece), Gladys Tang and Kenny Chen (Hong Kong), Svandís Svasvarsdóttir (Iceland), Helena Saunders (Ireland), Irit Meir and Meir Etedgi (Israel), WashingtonAkaranga (Kenya), Ronice Mueller de Quadros (Brazil), Rachel McKee (New Zealand), Michael Morgan (Japan), Sean Witty and Cho Wiyoung Witty (South Korea), Inmaculada Baez, Carmen Cabeza, Ana Fernández-Soneira, Mar Lourido-Francisco, and Juan Valiño-Freire (Spain), Wayne Smith (Taiwan), Nicholaus Mpingwa (Tanzania), Sam Lutalo (Uganda), Myriam Vermeerbergen and Diane Boonen (Belgium). I am also indebted to the dedicated team of people who have contributed to the copyediting, typesetting, design and production of this volume through all its stages, in particular Mona Shah, Pamela Perniss and Connie de Vos, and to my colleagues Sibaji Panda and Waldemar Schwager at our Deaf Empowerment Foundation, of which Ishara Press is a subsidiary. This volume is a direct result of the collaborative project. The majority of chapters have evolved from responses to the original questionnaires, and almost all authors have been involved with the project from the very beginning.All contributors have been extremely helpful with answering follow-up questions and cross-checking the data from their respective sign languages as successive publications were prepared that summarised the first results of the project (Zeshan 2004a, 2004b). This volume provides the opportunity of looking at a representative selection of sign languages from the original cross-linguistic study in much more detail, including many additions and modifications that add to our understanding of the structure of these sign languages. From June 2001 onwards, my work on sign language typology has been supported by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) through a post-doctoral fellowship and subsequent support for heading a junior research group (Emmy-Noether award ZE 507/1-1; 1-2; 1-3). The Research Centre for Linguistic Typology has additionally supported my fieldwork in Turkey, India, Lebanon and Egypt. I sincerely hope that this line of research will continue to be of benefit to the deaf communities involved. My final thanks go to my husband and my son, who have patiently shared with me all the ups and downs, the excitement and hardship, the good times and the bad times in so many places around the world. Ulrike Zeshan November 2005 12 Design of the volume P A R T I INTRODUCTION ulrike Zeshan 13 Chapter 1 Design of the volume Ulrike Zeshan 1. Background: From the project to the book This edited volume is somewhat unique in its structure and content and differs from the more common formats of edited books in important respects. Rather than being a collection of contributions by individual authors working separately from each other on a common topic, this volume is the direct result of a large, coordinated research effort. A number of important considerations in terms of what this volume can and cannot be stem from the nature of its origin and design, so it is worthwhile to briefly review the background to the genesis of this volume. The research project on the typology of interrogative and negative constructions in sign languages began in 1999 and ended in 2005, with the completion of the present volume being the final stage. This study was the first-ever attempt at a systematic large-scale investigation of a particular grammatical domain across a broad range of sign languages. 37 sign languages are represented in the project data, and 10 sign languages have been chosen to appear in this volume. The study began with an exploration of the conceptual domain of questions and negation, leading to the development of questionnaires that were subsequently sent to co-researchers around the world. Information from the answers to these questionnaires constituted the main source of data for the project, as well as the point of departure for writing most of the chapters in this volume. Almost all authors were originally participants in my typological project and had worked with a detailed questionnaire designed to elicit information about the structure of negatives and interrogatives in the target sign languages. I then selected some of the questionnaire responses to be expanded into book chapters and included in this volume. Further details about the methodology of the research project can be found in Section 2.1 of Chapter 2. 14 Design of the volume As is often the case with innovative undertakings of this kind, the starting point for this project was a basic intuition: That sign languages around the world were much more diverse from each other than one could make out from the existing sign language literature, and that the similarities and differences in sign language structures could be investigated systematically in a way quite similar to the cross- linguistic study of spoken languages. Pursuing this intuition immediately led to the one most important problem that anyone faces who approaches the typological study of sign languages, that is, the fact that most of the world’s sign languages are severely underdocumented or entirely unknown in terms of their grammatical structures. The existing sign language linguistics literature is heavily skewed in favour of Western sign languages, with American Sign Language in particular dominating the scene. Therefore, the possibilities of drawing upon published sources are very limited in sign language typology. In fact, the field of sign language linguistics has not produced a single comprehensive reference grammar of any sign language so far. Whereas spoken language typologists can often find a wide array of structural realisations of a grammatical domain by scanning the available literature, this option is not yet available for the comparative study of sign languages. For the further development of the research project and its results, this situation had two important consequences. First of all, it was clear that this project could not just be about collecting and systematizing existing data. Rather, if any significant diversity of languages and structures was to be approximated, most of the data would have to actually be generated by the project itself. The methodologies of data collection, which are described in detail in Chapter 2, are the direct and necessary result of this situation. In addition, major issues of concern arise from this methodology, the most important one being the reliability of these data (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3). Clearly, if a large part of the grammatical structures to be found in this volume have never been investigated before, there are limitations as far as their repeated verification, cross-checking and further detailing is concerned. In spite of repeated follow-up and revisions on the part of both the authors and the editor, this limitation remains very real, and the reader will do well to remember that a large part of the information in this volume is genuinely new and has never been published before. Secondly, the scarcity of available data also played a role in an important theoretical decision, the decision not to attempt any sampling of languages for this study. Usually, typological studies across spoken languages involve generating a representative sample of languages from which data are drawn for the study. The aim of sampling is to avoid undue bias in favour of a particular sub-group or sub- type of languages. A balanced sample of languages insures that the information we get from such a study is truly representative of all human (spoken) languages and not just typical of Indo-European languages only, for instance. Ideally, language samples for typological studies are both geographically and genetically balanced, that is, we do not want to have an overrepresentation of languages from either a particular region of the world or from a particular language family, and spoken ulrike Zeshan 15 language typologists have devised ways of working towards this kind of balance as part of the methodological development of the field over the past decades (Comrie 1989, Whaley 1997, Song 2001). As can be seen from the complete list of sign languages in Section 2.2 of Chapter 2, this kind of balanced sample has clearly not been achieved for the purpose of our project, and it was clear from the beginning that sampling would play no role in collecting the data corpus. In view of the fact that so little information is available about such a small number of sign languages, any and all available information was included in the data corpus, both from existing published sources and from those data especially generated during the course of the project. If any balanced sampling had been attempted, this would necessarily have resulted in a very small number of sign languages to be studied, and therefore the whole undertaking would have been defeated from the very beginning. Instead of dealing with a sample that would have been balanced, but too small to be at all meaningful for cross-linguistic comparison, a larger data corpus with some unavoidable bias was clearly the better option. Moreover, since this study was the first of its kind and there was no prior experience with typological diversity across sign languages, it was always possible for any sign language of any genetic or geographical affiliation to be highly significant for the study in unpredictable ways, and this was another argument in favour of including as much data from as many languages as possible. This decision has resulted in the overall data being skewed quite heavily in favour of European sign languages, although quite a number of Asian sign languages are also represented. The bias in favour of European and North American sign languages that already exists in the sign language literature was further reinforced by the fact that most eligible coresearchers for such a project are also located in the same region. Nevertheless, the project does cover all major regions of the world to some extent, particularly a good number ofAsian sign languages, whose structures often prove to be of special interest in the grammatical domain under investigation here. Another reason for the absence of sampling concerns the genetic balance of the language sample. The reason for ignoring this kind of sampling was not only the scarcity of available data, but also a more severe theoretical problem in sign language linguistics. Not only is the genetic affiliation of most sign languages simply unknown, but the very notion of language families is not at all a well-defined notion in sign language linguistics (Zeshan 2005). We simply do not know enough about historical change in sign languages, the possible results of contact between sign languages, and areal typology of sign languages. Posited relationships between sign languages are usually based on historical information about contacts between deaf communities, with the information itself often being anecdotal rather than the result of systematic research. Sign language linguistics so far has not developed any principled methods of establishing family membership for a particular sign language, reconstructing earlier forms of sign languages, or setting up family trees for sign languages. Therefore, any effort towards a genetically balanced sample of sign languages is again defeated from the very beginning, and all that can be done 16 Design of the volume is to draw attention to this current limitation in sign language typology research in general and in this volume in particular. Nevertheless, it is definitely the case that not all sign languages represented in the research project are related to one another, so we do have a number of different genetic groupings (though it is not clear exactly which ones and how many), as well as a number of different geographical regions. For the purpose of this volume, one important consideration for choosing contributions for the individual chapters was to attempt maximum diversity of languages represented in the book. To the best of my knowledge, none of these sign languages are immediately or closely related to one another. The geographical diversity of the sign languages covered by the individual book chapters is indicated in Table 1, and it is evident from this list that the European bias does not apply here. In fact, we do have quite a well-balanced list in Table 1, except that Africa is not represented at all. In addition to aiming at the maximum possible diversity, an important consideration for choosing languages for the chapters was the quality of the original questionnaires produced by the authors, and the potential of turning those into chapters for the volume. The data collection phase of the project resulted in a total of 18 questionnaires of widely diverging quality and quantity. Most of the chapters in the volume have developed out of the answers to one of the project questionnaires, with a few exceptions as detailed in Section 2. Finally, the choice of chapters also depended on the typological significance of the language in question in the sense that sign languages with typologically unusual structures or particular typologically interesting aspects had priority for being included in the volume. While still far from being exhaustive, I do believe that this volume succeeds in assembling a good number of widely diverging structures within the target domain, and is a successful first step in documenting the true scale of linguistic diversity across sign languages. 2. Parts and chapters This volume consists of three parts. The first introductory part sets the general background for the studies of individual sign languages, and focuses on two aspects. On the one hand, details about the research project from which this volume has resulted are summarised, so that readers are in a position to evaluate for themselves the scope and significance of the individual chapters and the book as a whole. This is especially important because the evolution of this volume out of a collaborative research project has important consequences for the presentation and the content of the book. Each chapter must be seen in the light of the project as a whole rather than being a stand-alone contribution by the individual author. The sections in Chapter 2 on data and on methodology are particularly useful for understanding the relevant background. Secondly, the introductory part also summarises the most important results of the whole project. While a full account of the findings from the comparative analysis of all sign language data can obviously not be given, Chapter 2 does highlight and ulrike Zeshan 17 Europe Asia 3northern Europe western Europe southern Europe 1 (Finland) 1 (Belgium) 1 (Greece)

Sign Language Typology Series

Details

Download

Copyright

We respect the copyrights and intellectual property rights of all users. All uploaded documents are either original works of the uploader or authorized works of the rightful owners.

Support