24. Shared sign languages

Nyst, Victoria

doi:10.1515/9783110261325.552

Cited by 95 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…In contrast, indicating verbs are claimed to be much more frequent and systematic in sign language "creoles" than "pidgins", as seen in the first and second cohorts of Nicaraguan Sign Language users (Senghas & Coppola 2001), and in younger sign languages as they develop through different stages -e.g., Israeli Sign Language (Meir 2016). Indicating verbs are apparently rare in some "village sign languages" (i.e., sign languages used by deaf and hearing members of a small close-knit community), such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, Providence Island Sign Language, and Kata Kolok (Aronoff et al 2004b;Marsaja 2008;de Vos 2012;Nyst 2012). In at least one case, the lack of indicating verbs is accompanied by lack of referential pointing to absent human referents in the language generally: de Vos (2012) reports that Kata Kolok signers prefer establishing and maintaining reference via pointing to fingers on the non-dominant hand (i.e., list buoys, see Liddell 2003) rather than pointing to locations in space.…”

Section: Emerging Sign Languages and Grammaticalisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

Schembri

Cormier

Fenlon³

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In this paper, we present arguments for an analysis of indicating verbs, building on Liddell (2000), as a typologically unique, unimodal fusion of signs and pointing gestures used for reference tracking. This contrasts with many formalist analyses that assume that directionality in indicating verbs constitutes an agreement marking system. While exploring some of the debate in the literature about these forms, we propose a model of indicating verbs within a Construction Grammar framework that compares them to multimodal constructions in spoken languages. We explain how our model of indicating verbs appear to align with a growing body of research on co-speech gesture and is supported by some recent findings about these verbs from corpus-based studies of sign languages.

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Section: Emerging Sign Languages and Grammaticalisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

Schembri

Cormier

Fenlon³

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Yet Israel is home to a number of other sign languages which have arisen there over the past century, languages used by smaller, sometimes insular communities with an unusually high percentage of congenital deafness. Such languages are termed village sign languages (Meir et al, 2010; Nyst, 2012; Zeshan and de Vos, 2012) present other terms used in the literature to refer to these communities). Two village sign languages have already been documented in Israel.…”

Section: Kafr Qasem Sign Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of embedded structure: insights from Kafr Qasem Sign Language

Kastner¹,

Meir²,

Sandler³

et al. 2014

Front. Psychol.

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This paper introduces data from Kafr Qasem Sign Language (KQSL), an as-yet undescribed sign language, and identifies the earliest indications of embedding in this young language. Using semantic and prosodic criteria, we identify predicates that form a constituent with a noun, functionally modifying it. We analyze these structures as instances of embedded predicates, exhibiting what can be regarded as very early stages in the development of subordinate constructions, and argue that these structures may bear directly on questions about the development of embedding and subordination in language in general. Deutscher (2009) argues persuasively that nominalization of a verb is the first step—and the crucial step—toward syntactic embedding. It has also been suggested that prosodic marking may precede syntactic marking of embedding (Mithun, 2009). However, the relevant data from the stage at which embedding first emerges have not previously been available. KQSL might be the missing piece of the puzzle: a language in which a noun can be modified by an additional predicate, forming a proposition within a proposition, sustained entirely by prosodic means.

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“…Another important challenge for the field is to disentangle which linguistic characteristics of (rural) sign languages have been shaped by the specific circumstances in which they have emerged (De Vos & Pfau 2015). Such factors include not just time-depth, but also the lack of formal education in any written language, overall community size, the sheer numbers of hearing second language learners who have adopted the local sign language, the causes, types and incidence of hearing loss, as well as the level of geographical dispersion (de Vos & Zeshan 2012;Nyst 2012). It is also possible that some aspects of the linguistic structure are more easily affected by these social factors than others.…”

Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%