Abstract

AbstractNatural languages come in two different modalities – the aural-auditory modality of spoken languages and the visual-gestural modality of sign languages. The impact of modality on the grammatical system has been discussed at great length in the last 20 years. By contrast, the impact of modality on semantics in general and on ambiguities in particular has not yet been addressed in detail. In this paper, we deal with different types of ambiguities in sign languages. We discuss typical lexical and structural ambiguities as well as modality-specific aspects such as ambiguities in the use of the signing space and non-manual markers. In addition, we address the questions how sign languages avoid ambiguities and to what extent certain kinds of ambiguities and non-ambiguities depend on the visual-manual modality of sign languages. Since gestures use the same articulatory channel that is also active in the production of signs, we also discuss ambiguities between gestures on the one hand and grammaticalized gestures and signs on the other.

Highlights

  • Natural languages have two modalities at their disposal, the oral-auditory mo­ dality of spoken languages and the visual-gestural modality of sign languages

  • Sign languages actively use the geometrical properties of the three-dimensional signing space to realize morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic categories

  • Sign languages, unlike spoken languages, do not use one ­semantically underspecified reciprocal marker to express the three interpretations subsumed under the notion plurality of relations but quite different ­modality-specific strategies

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Summary

Introduction

Natural languages have two modalities at their disposal, the oral-auditory mo­ dality of spoken languages and the visual-gestural modality of sign languages. We address interesting cases of non-ambiguities, that is, examples that are typically ambiguous in spoken ­languages but disambiguated in sign languages because of modality-specific ­factors. Sign languages can, use additional non-­manual articulators such as the mouth or the face to disambiguate ambiguous lexical items. Mouth gestures are not loan expressions borrowed from the surrounding spoken language but modality-specific grammatical markers. Another kind of lexical ambiguity found in sign languages is the specification of parts of speech and plural inflection. The corresponding interpretation depends on the syntactic and semantic context the sign is used in Note that this kind of ambiguity is not modality-specific since it is found in many spoken languages. This section concentrates on four different phenomena where (non-)ambiguities arise under specific morphosyntactic conditions: plurality of relations, coordination and scalar implicatures, relative quantifier scope, and ellipsis

Plurality of relations
Notational conventions
Coordination
Quantifier scope ambiguities
Ellipsis
Discourse referents in signing space
Role shift
Conclusion
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