Syntactic Correlates of Brow Raise in ASL

Wilbur, Ronnie Β.; Patschke, Cynthia

doi:10.1075/sll.2.1.03wil

Cited by 87 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…although its optionality remains a controversy, brow raise as a non-manual marker for polar questions is quite common among the sign languages discussed so far 1 . When it occurs, it usually extends over the entire clause , Wilbur and Patschke 1999, nKMBL 2000 , Sutton-Spence & Woll 1999). example (1) and (2) in HKSL involve no word order changes but the clauses can be marked non-manually by brow raise.…”

Section: Polar Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Zeshan¹

2006

179

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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. 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. Mo...

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Section: Polar Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Zeshan¹

2006

179

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“…I have argued that 'br' covers the restriction of the operator (following Partee 1991; the RC is the restriction, the nuclear scope is the head) and does not spread over the c-command domain, in contrast to NMM associated with monadic operators like negation and [+wh]. Thus, we expect to see 'br' on the material in Spec, CP but not on the material in C (Wilbur 1999;Wilbur 2011a …”

Section: How Do We Account For the Location Of 'Br' In The Rc?mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Grammatical NMM has a sharper onset (timing of the start) and offset than affective facial expressions, and is tightly coordinated with the syntactic constituents that it marks. Also, there is a clear distinction between co-speech facial gestures used by non-signing hearing people (for example, negative headshake) and the grammatical NMM produced during signing (Wilbur & Patschke 1999), as well as a different developmental progression in signing vs non-signing children (Anderson & Reilly 1998). Thus, the use of NMM for syntactic purposes like RCs as discussed below must be understood as part of the grammar of each SL.…”

Section: The Use Of Nmmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However these languages do have wh-signs and various wh-movement and in situ options (see summary in Cecchetto 2012: 307). In addition, ASL makes very common use of the pseudocleft or wh-cleft, as shown in (25) (Wilbur 1996;Wilbur & Patschke 1999 Note the right edge preference for wh-word in (25c-e). (25b) shows that the wh-word does not have to be at the right edge if it appears as part of a d-linked complex NP (which computer), and (25e) demonstrates that when separated from its NP by topicalization, the wh-word cannot appear elsewhere (even when fronted by a process that is acceptable in otherwise full-fledged wh-clauses).…”

Section: Free Relativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Internally-headed relative clauses in sign languages

Wilbur

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This chapter considers relative clause data from sign languages in light of their variation with respect to basic word order, nonmanual marking, and presence/absence of internally-headed and externally-headed relative clauses. Syntactically, a double merge cartographic model (Cinque 2005a;, following Brunelli (2011), is adopted. The differences across sign languages are suggested to result from differences in raising requirements with respect to the relative clauses themselves and with respect to their heads, rather than basic word order, use of complementizers, relative pronouns, or nominalizers, or (type of) nonmanual marking. Typologically, it is noted that several of the SVO SLs have IHRCs, that at least one SOV SL does not have IHRCs, and that three of the SLs have both internally-headed (IHRCs) and externally-headed (EHRCs) relative clauses.

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“…This relatively new research direction is especially promising and is yet to be explored in depth. The non-manual parameters play an essential role in SL communication because they are related to the meaning of a sign, the syntax or the prosody [54], [10], [69], [70]. There are methods related to the direct recognition of non-manual linguistic markers [43], [42], [38], as applied to negations, conditional clauses, syntactic boundaries, topic/focus and wh-, yes/no questions.…”

Section: Non-manual Features In Aslrmentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey on mouth modeling and analysis for Sign Language recognition

Antonakos

Roussos

Zafeiriou

2015

2015 11th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG)

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Abstract-Around 70 million Deaf worldwide use Sign Languages (SLs) as their native languages. At the same time, they have limited reading/writing skills in the spoken language. This puts them at a severe disadvantage in many contexts, including education, work, usage of computers and the Internet. Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) can support the Deaf in many ways, e.g. by enabling the development of systems for Human-Computer Interaction in SL and translation between sign and spoken language. Research in ASLR usually revolves around automatic understanding of manual signs. Recently, ASLR research community has started to appreciate the importance of non-manuals, since they are related to the lexical meaning of a sign, the syntax and the prosody. Nonmanuals include body and head pose, movement of the eyebrows and the eyes, as well as blinks and squints. Arguably, the mouth is one of the most involved parts of the face in non-manuals. Mouth actions related to ASLR can be either mouthings, i.e. visual syllables with the mouth while signing, or non-verbal mouth gestures. Both are very important in ASLR. In this paper, we present the first survey on mouth non-manuals in ASLR. We start by showing why mouth motion is important in SL and the relevant techniques that exist within ASLR. Since limited research has been conducted regarding automatic analysis of mouth motion in the context of ALSR, we proceed by surveying relevant techniques from the areas of automatic mouth expression and visual speech recognition which can be applied to the task. Finally, we conclude by presenting the challenges and potentials of automatic analysis of mouth motion in the context of ASLR.

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Syntactic Correlates of Brow Raise in ASL

Cited by 87 publications

References 20 publications

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Internally-headed relative clauses in sign languages

A survey on mouth modeling and analysis for Sign Language recognition

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