Verb agreement in Brazilian Sign Language

Lourenço, Guilherme

doi:10.1075/sll.00036.lou

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…Other verbs, like HATE (a psych verb), are less likely to use path movement crosslinguistically, but may use other strategies (e.g., palm orientation in ASL). Verbs of perception and cognition, on the other hand, are often anchored at implicated organs (SEE is articulated at the eyes in many sign languages) or metaphorically linked body parts (THINK is articulated at the head), blocking morphological argument marking strategies altogether (Lourenço, 2018;Oomen, 2017). The diversity of argument-marking strategies in sign languages thus suggests why different classes of events are more or less reliably coded in silent gesture by the features we included in our model, and offers additional considerations for the selection of stimuli for future studies.…”

Section: Events Transitivity and Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Form and Event Semantics Predict Transitivity in Silent Gestures: Evidence for Compositionality

Bradley,

Wilbur

2023

Cognitive Science

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Silent gesture is not considered to be linguistic, on par with spoken and sign languages. It is claimed that silent gestures, unlike language, represent events holistically, without compositional structure. However, recent research has demonstrated that gesturers use consistent strategies when representing objects and events, and that there are behavioral and clinically relevant limits on what form a gesture may take to effect a particular meaning. This systematicity challenges a holistic interpretation of silent gesture, which predicts that there should be no stable form‐meaning correspondence across event representations. Here, we demonstrate to the contrary that untrained gesturers systematically manipulate the form of their gestures when representing events with and without a theme (e.g., Someone popped the balloon vs. Someone walked), that is, transitive and intransitive events. We elicited silent gestures and annotated them for manual features active in coding transitivity distinctions in sign languages. We trained linear support vector machines to make item‐by‐item transitivity predictions based on these features. Prediction accuracy was good across the entire dataset, thus demonstrating that systematicity in silent gesture can be explained with recourse to subunits. We argue that handshape features are constructs co‐opted from cognitive systems subserving manual action production and comprehension for communicative purposes, which may integrate into the linguistic system of emerging sign languages. We further suggest that nonsigners tend to map event participants to each hand, a strategy found across genetically and geographically distinct sign languages, suggesting the strategy's cognitive foundation.

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Section: Events Transitivity and Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Form and Event Semantics Predict Transitivity in Silent Gestures: Evidence for Compositionality

Bradley,

Wilbur

2023

Cognitive Science

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Morphology in Sign Languages

Pfau,

Steinbach

2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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Sign languages show the same range of morphological processes as spoken languages. Linguistic research on many different sign languages has identified various kinds of inflectional and derivational processes. At the same time, morphological processes in sign languages are subject to modality‐specific properties not found in spoken languages. The impact of the visual–spatial modality makes sign languages typologically more uniform than spoken languages. Three modality‐specific properties are especially relevant for the discussion of sign language morphology: (i) the simultaneous realization of morphosyntactic features; (ii) the interaction of morphology with phonology in the overt realization of these features; and (iii) the impact of gestures on morphological processes. This entry does not provide a comprehensive survey of all morphological phenomena attested in sign languages. It discusses instead three prominent and well‐investigated inflectional processes – agreement, classifiers and nominal plural – and shows how different generative theories (minimalist program, Distributed Morphology, and Optimality Theory) can account for the modality‐independent as well as for the modality‐specific properties of inflection in sign languages. Still, we also point out that classical generative theories developed for spoken languages probably need to be supplemented by a gestural component to account for the impact of gestures on sign language morphology. The main goal of this entry is to exemplify how far morphological processes in sign languages can contribute to a broader understanding of morphological typology and theory.

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Verb agreement in Brazilian Sign Language

Cited by 2 publications

References 4 publications

Visual Form and Event Semantics Predict Transitivity in Silent Gestures: Evidence for Compositionality

Visual Form and Event Semantics Predict Transitivity in Silent Gestures: Evidence for Compositionality

Morphology in Sign Languages

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