Sign Language Discourse Research Articles

The Case of Mouth Action in Israeli Sign Language Discourse

This article discusses the function of a particular feature of sign language—mouth action—as it is expressed in various discourse contexts. Specifically, we examine forms of mouthing and mouth gesture as they are used in signed narrative and expository texts, highlighting the signers' choices during the production of these two text types. We propose a new perspective on mouth action types, relying on insights from the domain of discourse analysis combined with functional categories proposed in previous studies on mouth actions in sign languages. Six deaf native signers of Israeli Sign Language (ISL) produced twelve texts, yielding a corpus of 2,125 mouth actions (1,112 in narrative texts and 1,013 in expository texts). Our study points to both quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of mouth actions in the two text types. The findings emphasize the importance of the two types of mouth actions as essential means of decoding the message, and they highlight the way mouth actions serve the text and are affected by it.

Constituent order in Serbian Sign Language declarative clauses

Constituent order can encode grammatical relations in a language. The visual-spatial modality imbues sign languages with characteristics such as simultaneity or the use of space which raise the question of the appropriate unit of analysis in constituent order studies. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the order of core constituents in elicited declarative clauses for non-reversible, reversible and locative states-of-affairs in Serbian Sign Language (SZJ). Forty (near-)native deaf SZJ signers, ranging in age between 18 and 70 years old, participated in the data-collection. We consider linguistic and social factors in 810 clauses elicited for the purposes of this study. Our findings suggest that SVO is a preferred order in non-locative clauses with two overtly expressed arguments, whilst GROUND-FIGURE-LOCATIVE RELATION is the most frequent pattern in locative clauses. We argue that our results provide some support for the claim that sign language discourse can be analysed in terms of constituent order in the clause, but that other strategies typical of the visual modality such as the simultaneous expression of core constituents, and manual and non-manual features, the use of space, core argument incorporation into the form of the verb and core argument omission, complicate the traditional notion of sequential constituent order clause as a central grammatical element in SZJ and, by extension, in other sign languages. Consequently, the description of relations between core constituents calls for careful consideration and analysis of different types of data as a way of gaining a clearer insight into the nature of a sign language.

Figure–Ground Spatial Relationships in Finnish Sign Language Discourse

AbstractThis study is about expressing spatial relationships between Figure and Ground in Finnish Sign Language discourse and shows that the variation in this expression is primarily discourse dependent. The main findings are, first, that Ground mainly precedes Figure whether the Figure is new or a known referent within the discourse; the reverse order is possible only when the Figure is known. Second, the lexical signolla(‘have’) appears more frequently in expressing spatial relationships with a new Figure and less frequently with a known Figure but never in a construction with Figure preceding Ground; the formoli(‘had’), referring to the past, appears only in Figure preceding Ground constructions when Figure is known. Finally, the main way to express the spatial relationship between Ground and Figure is either the simultaneous production of the units, or Ground and an adposition sign. A sequential strategy is another way of expressing spatial relationships but this can be used only when the Figure is new within the discourse. The choice of strategy can be attributed to the emphasis put on the Figure’s presence when it is new while with a known Figure, the emphasis is on the location of that Figure.

Contribution of the Semiological Approach to Deixis-Anaphora in Sign Language: The Key Role of Eye-Gaze.

We address the issue of deixis–anaphora in sign language (SL) discourse, focusing on the role of eye-gaze. According to the Semiological Approach, SL structuring stems from a maximum exploitation of the visuo-gestural modality, which results in two modes of meaning production, depending on the signer’s semiotic intent. Involving both non-manual and manual parameters, the first mode, expressing the intent to say while showing, uses constructions based on structures, the termed “transfer structures.” The second one, expressing the intent to say without showing, involves lexical, pointing and fingerspelling units. In order to situate our descriptive concepts with respect to those used by SL linguists who, like us, adopt a cognitive–functionalist perspective, we expose a specific theoretical foundation of our approach, the “enunciation theories.” The concept of “enunciation” is decisive for understanding the role of eye-gaze, as being at the foundation of deixis and the key vector of referential creation and tracking in SL discourse. “Enunciation” entails the opposition between “Enunciation” and “Utterance” Domains. The first links, as co-enunciators, the signer/speaker and his/her addressee, establishing them by the very “act of enunciation” as 1st and 2nd person. The second is internal to the discourse produced. Grounding on corpora of narratives in several SLs (some with no historical link), we illustrate this crucial role of eye-gaze and the diversity of functions it fulfills. Our analyses, carried out in this perspective, attest to the multiple structural similarities between SLs, particularly with regard to transfer structures. This result strongly supports the typological hypothesis underlying our approach, namely, that these structures are common to all SLs. We thus show that an enunciative analysis, based on the key role of eye-gaze in these visual languages that are SLs, is able to give the simplest account of their own linguistic economy and, in particular, of deixis–anaphora in these languages.

The Conceptualization of Space: Places in Signed Language Discourse.

We examine the conceptualization of space in signed language discourse within the theory of cognitive grammar. Adopting a Places view, we define Place as a symbolic structure that associates a schematic semantic pole and a schematic phonological pole. Places acquire full contextual meaning and a specific spatial location in the context of a usage event. In the present article, we analyze the referential function of Places in different grammatical constructions throughout a selection of videos produced by deaf Argentine Sign Language signers. Our analysis examines Places, which are associated with entities in the surrounding spatial environment as well as Places that are created or recruited in discourse without reference to surrounding physical entities. We observe that Places are used in pointing, placing, and other grammatical constructions in order to introduce and track referents in ongoing discourse. We also examine the use of conceptual reference points, by which Places afford mental access to new related concepts that are the intended focus of attention. These results allow us to discuss three related issues. First, for signed language discourse, space is both semantically and phonologically loaded. Signers’ semantic and phonological choices for Place symbolic structures are motivated by embodied experience and the abstraction of usage events. Second, Places occur along a continuum from deixis to anaphor, united by the same conceptual system and differing in extent of phonological subjectification. Third, we suggest developmental implications of our Place analysis.

Review of The Meaning of Space in Sign Language: Reference, Specificity and Structure in Catalan Sign Language Discourse

Review of The Meaning of Space in Sign Language: Reference, Specificity and Structure in Catalan Sign Language Discourse

The semiotic diversity of doing reference in a deaf signed language

This article describes how deaf signers of Auslan (a deaf signed language of Australia) coordinate fully conventionalised forms (such as lexical manual signs and English fingerspelling and/or mouthing) with more richly improvised semiotics (such as indicating verbs, pointing signs, depicting signs, visible surrogates and/or invisible surrogates) to identify and talk about referents of varying agency. Using twenty retellings of Frog, Where Are You? and twenty retellings of The Boy Who Cried Wolf archived in the Auslan Corpus, we analysed 4,699 tokens of referring expressions with respect to: (a) activation status; (b) semiotic form; and (c) animacy. Statistical analysis confirmed choice of strategy was most strongly motivated by activation status: new referents were expressed with more conventionalised forms (especially lexical manual signs and English mouthing), whereas maintained and reintroduced referents typically involved fewer and more richly improvised, context-dependent semiotics. However, animacy was also a motivating factor: humans and animals were often depicted via visible surrogates (not pointing signs), whereas inanimate referents favoured depicting signs and invisible surrogates. These findings highlight the role of animacy in signed language discourse and challenge the claim that informativeness decreases as cognitive saliency increases, while demonstrating the ‘pretend world’ indexicality of signed language use and the pluralistic complexity of face-to-face communication.

Depicting and describing meanings with iconic signs in Norwegian Sign Language

AbstractThere is growing momentum towards a theory of languaging that acknowledges the diverse semiotic repertoires people use with each other. This paper contributes to this goal by providing further evidence from signed language discourse. In particular, we examine iconic signs from Norwegian Sign Language, which can be interpreted as both “regular” lexical signs and token depictions. This dual potential is manipulated by signers in context. We analyze these signs asdescriptionsanddepictions, two different modes of representation. Then we compare these signs to some of the description and depiction that occurs in spoken language discourse. In this way we aim to present some of the advantages of using description and depiction in analyses of communication and interaction. By doing this, we also forge links between the languaging of speakers and the languaging of signers.

Grammatical facial expression recognition in sign language discourse: a study at the syntax level

Facial Expression Recognition is an already well-developed research area, mainly due to its applicability in the construction of different system types. Facial expressions are especially important in the area which relates to the construction of discourses through sign language. Sign languages are visual-spatial languages that are not assisted by voice intonation. Therefore, they use facial expressions to support the manifestation of prosody aspects and some grammatical constructions. Such expressions are called Grammatical Facial Expressions (GFEs) and they are present at sign language morphological and syntactic levels. GFEs stand out in automated recognition processes for sign languages, as they help removing ambiguity among signals, and they also contribute to compose the semantic meaning of discourse. This paper aims to present a study which applies inductive reasoning to recognize patterns, as a way to study the problem involving the automated recognition of GFEs at the discourse syntactic level in the Libras Sign Language (Brazilian Sign Language). In this study, sensor Microsoft Kinect was used to capture three-dimensional points in the faces of subjects who were fluent in sign language, generating a corpus of Libras phrases, which comprised different syntactic constructions. This corpus was analyzed through classifiers that were implemented through neural network Multilayer Perceptron, and then a series of experiments was conducted. The experiments allowed investigating: the recognition complexity that is inherent to each of the GFEs that are present in the corpus; the use suitability of different vector representations, considering descriptive characteristics that are based on coordinates of points in three dimensions, distances and angles therefrom; the need for using time data regarding the execution of expressions during speech; and particularities that are connected to data labeling and the evaluation of classifying models in the context of a sign language.

Bimodal code-mixing: Dutch spoken language elements in NGT discourse

Mouthings, the spoken language elements in sign language discourse, are typically analysed as having a redundant, one-on-one relationship with manual signs, both semantically and temporally. We explore exceptions to this presupposed semantic and temporal congruency in a corpus of spontaneous signed conversation by deaf users of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). We identify specifying mouthings (words with a different meaning than the co-occurring sign), solo mouthings (uttered while the hands are inactive) and added mouthings (words added to a signing stream without their corresponding sign), and make a sentence-level analysis of their occurrences. These non-redundant mouthings occurred in 12% of all utterances, and were made by almost all signers. We argue for the presence of a code-blending continuum for NGT, where NGT is the matrix language and spoken Dutch is blended in, in various degrees. We suggest expansion of existing code-mixing models, to allow for description of bimodal mixing.

Manual backchannel responses in signers' conversations in Swedish Sign Language

The current study aims to determine the manual backchannel responses that signers use in Swedish Sign Language discourse by analyzing a subset of the SSL Corpus. The investigation found 20% of the backchannel responses in this data to be manual. The study focuses on the manual backchannel responses that consist of signs (mostly the sign gloss YES) and gesture-like signs (PU “palms up”), and other manual activities, which can occur at a relatively low height in signing space. With respect to age groups, younger signers engage in more weak manual activity than older signers.

Indefiniteness and specificity marking in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

Bringing together the areas of sign language semantics-pragmatics interface and discourse reference, this article offers a description of how indefiniteness and (non‑)specificity is encoded in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). By using a combined methodology of corpus data and grammatical tests, the present study shows that the encoding of indefiniteness and specificity in LSC is achieved by three main means, namely lexical signs, the use of nonmanuals, and the use of signing space. The basic primitives required to analyze specificity in LSC comprise wide scope, epistemicity, and partitivity. This article proposes an analysis of the use of signing space in contributing meaning and provides insights into the characterization of the abstract import of signing space.

Intensifier actions in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) discourse

The study describes certain structural modifications employed on the citation forms of ISL during signing for intensification purposes. In Signed Languages, citation forms are considered relatively immune to modifications. Nine signers signed several scenarios describing some intense quality. The signers used conventional adverbs existing in ISL for intensification purposes. Yet, they also employed idiosyncratic modifications on the formational components of adjectives simultaneously to form realization. These optional modifications enriched the messages conveyed merely by the conventional forms. They show that signers can incorporate gradient modes of expressions directly into the production of the lexical items to communicate more diverse and explicit messages in context. Using a comparative semiotic approach allowed us to describe the synergetic cooperation manifested at the stage of utterance construction between formational elements which were more suited to convey gradient and analog meanings in context and those that were less suited and thus not modified.

Elaborating Who's What: A Study of Constructed Action and Clause Structure in Auslan (Australian Sign Language)

In spoken and signed language discourse, periods of gestural enactment, or constructed action, appear sequentially and simultaneously with linguistic signs. In the domain of signed language research, constructed action has been shown to be an important part of narrative discourse. However, there has yet to be much empirical investigation into its frequency or interaction with a signed language grammar. The current study addresses this gap with a corpus-based investigation of constructed action in Auslan (the native signed language of the Australian deaf community). We present evidence from 39 Auslan narratives that show constructed action may function as core elements of a clause—i.e. as the predicate or arguments. With these findings, we demonstrate how constructed action interacts with clause structure—to form tightly integrated composite utterances. The data show that any syntactic investigation of a signed language must acknowledge this type of gestural behaviour and consider its contribution to meaning construction. This work points toward the need for more investigation of constructed action in spoken language discourse.

Use and Functions of Spatial Planes in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) Discourse

Although the phonological description of spatial planes that configure signing space is very detailed (Brentari 1998; Liddell and Johnson 1989; Sandler 1989), our knowledge of their use and functions at the discourse level is still very limited. This article describes the use of the spatial planes in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). It provides a unified treatment of various linguistic phenomena (e.g., hierarchical relations and locatives) that have hitherto been described separately in the sign language literature and of other aspects (e.g., encoding of specificity) that have not yet been the subject of research in LSC or other signed languages. The features found in two of the three spatial planes as described in the phonological literature are also relevant beyond the sentence level and serve well-defined discourse functions.

Point of view in British Sign Language and spoken English narrative discourse: the example of “The Tortoise and the Hare”

AbstractThis paper discusses how point of view (POV) is expressed in British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English narrative discourse. Spoken languages can mark changes in POV using strategies such as direct/indirect discourse, whereas signed languages can mark changes in POV in a unique way using “role shift”. Role shift is where the signer “becomes” a referent by taking on attributes of that referent, e.g. facial expression. In this study, two native BSL users and two native British English speakers were asked to tell the story “The Tortoise and the Hare”. The data were then compared to see how point of view is expressed and maintained in both languages. The results indicated that the spoken English users preferred the narrator's perspective, whereas the BSL users preferred a character's perspective. This suggests that spoken and signed language users may structure stories in different ways. However, some co-speech gestures and facial expressions used in the spoken English stories to denote characters' thoughts and feelings bear resemblance to the hand movements and facial expressions used by the BSL storytellers. This suggests that while approaches to storytelling may differ, both languages share some gestural resources which manifest themselves in different ways across different modalities.

Gradient and categorically: Handshape's two semiotic dimensions in Israeli Sign Language discourse

The study describes certain structural modifications in handshapes as created by native signers of Israeli Sign Language. Though often iconic, handshapes are deemed categorical (and thus linguistic) meaningful units in Signed Languages. Yet some scholars claim that signers modify handshape structure to represent changes in meaning in a gradient manner. They consider such modifications as an iconic gesture ‘overlay’ on handshapes in discourse. Eight signers were asked to sign several scenarios. Most modified handshape structure to represent changes in size or shape in the contextual representative referent in a gradient manner. These structural modifications enriched the messages conveyed through handshapes in context. They revealed the signers’ awareness of the iconicity of a handshape and its articulatory features. Most of all, they demonstrated, in our holistic point of view, the merger of gradient gestural features within the unit structure rather than the overlay of iconic gestures on discrete units: that handshapes are both gradient and categorical units. The study results thus support the claim that we should abandon the effort to separate gradient-gestures (thus, non-linguistic) from categorical (linguistic) units and develop a more comparative semiotic approach to how different types of features synchronize synergistically at the stage of utterance construction.

Discourse in signed languages

In this volume, editor Cynthia B. Roy presents a stellar cast of cognitive linguists, sociolinguists, and discourse analysts to discover and demonstrate how sign language users make sense of what is going on within their social and cultural contexts in face-to-face interactions. In the first chapter, Paul Dudis presents an innovative perspective on depiction in discourse. Mary Thumann follows with her observations on constructed dialogue and constructed action. Jack Hoza delineates the discourse and politeness functions of hey and well in ASL as examples of discourse markers in the third chapter.Laurie Swabey investigates reference in ASL discourse in the fourth chapter. In Chapter 5, Christopher Stone offers insights on register related to genre in British Sign Language discourse, and Daniel Roush addresses in Chapter 6 the conduit metaphor in English and ASL. Jeffrey Davis completes this collection by mapping out the nature of discourse in Plains Indian Sign Language, a previously unstudied language. The major thread that ties together the work of these varying linguists is their common focus on the forms and functions of sign languages used by people in actual situations. They each provide new keys to answering how thoughts expressed in one setting with one term or one utterance may mean something totally different when expressed in a different setting with different participants and different purposes.

Happen Can’t Hear: An Analysis of Code-Blends in Hearing, Native Signers of American Sign Language

Happen Can’t Hear:An Analysis of Code-Blends in Hearing, Native Signers of American Sign Language Michele Bishop (bio) Hearing native signers often learn sign language as their first language and acquire features that are characteristic of sign languages but are not present in equivalent ways in English (e.g., grammatical facial expressions and the structured use of space for setting up tokens and surrogates). Previous research has indicated that bimodal bilinguals draw heavily on American Sign Language (ASL) discourse structures even while predominantly speaking (Emmorey, Borinstein, and Thompson 2003; Bishop and Hicks 2005; Bishop et al. 2006; Pyers and Emmorey 2008). This article analyzes the way in which bimodal bilinguals (hereafter referred to as children of deaf adults, or Codas) simultaneously draw on both ASL and English. Data presented herein indicate that Codas exploit the integration of two grammars, as well as extragrammatical features (e.g., eye gaze, use of space) that are crucial to meaning due to the presence of ASL in their spoken English discourse and its influence on that discourse (Bishop and Hicks 2005; Bishop et al. 2006). These extragrammatical features express meaning in ways that far exceed the capabilities of grammar alone (Liddell 2003). The addition of a signed language to bilingualism studies adds interesting dimensions, especially with regard to native signers who have [End Page 205] both English and ASL as their first language (the participants of this research). The ability to produce aspects of two languages simultaneously is unprecedented in the area of spoken language bilingualism: For unimodal (speech-speech) bilinguals, the vocal tract is used for output in both languages. In contrast, for bimodal (speech-sign) bilinguals, there are two output channels: the vocal tract and the hands. In addition, unimodal bilinguals perceive both languages by the same sensory system (audition), whereas for bimodal bilinguals one language is perceived auditorily and the other is perceived visually. (Emmorey, Borinstein, and Thompson 2003) The term code-blending is also known as code-mixing in the literature, although the terms have quite different meanings when describing simultaneous utterances in bimodal output as opposed to sequential ones in unimodal output. Bimodality, therefore, offers researchers a new way of observing the alternation between, and the simultaneous production of, two very typologically distinct languages, in this case English and ASL. This simultaneous bimodal output should not be analyzed on a strictly grammatical level because meaning is conveyed through structures that are sufficiently independent of the grammar. Applying morphosyntactic criteria to determine a base language will not suffice when the simultaneous bimodal utterances are grammatically correct in both languages. Rather, it would be more productive to determine how each language contributes meaning to the overall utterance. While this is a vastly different approach from theoretical modes such as the matrix language frame model proposed by Myers-Scotton (1993), it is a crucial one because a matrix language is not easily determined for some code-blends. Van den Bogaerde and Baker’s (2005) approach, on the other hand, classifies code-blended utterances on the basis of the entire proposition. They explore the ways in which Dutch and Dutch Sign Language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal; hereafter NGT) each contributes meaning in code-blended utterances in Deaf mother/hearing child dyads. In this analysis, code-blends are classified according to van den Bogaerde and Baker’s model. For the purposes of analysis, the code-blends are categorized into two groups, semantically equivalent (the two utterances express equivalent meaning) and semantically [End Page 206] nonequivalent (each language contributes a complementary but nonequivalent meaning). The data indicate that, with the classification of semantically nonequivalent propositions, classifications beyond those described by van den Bogaerde and Baker are created and described (i.e., evaluative and elaborative code-blends). Apparently these additional categories, which derive from the present data, are directly due to the differences in complexity between the adult data of this research and the data collected from children under five years of age in van den Bogaerde and Baker’s research. The goal of this article, therefore, is to determine what kinds of code-blends are used in naturalistic discourse and to devise a means to categorize them. The data are classified according to the four...

Discurso en el aula en lengua de señas colombiana

Este artículo presenta los resultados de la aplicación del modelo de análisis del discurso de Sinclair y Coulthard (1975), con las modificaciones que aparecen en Coulthard (1992), a un corpus de discurso en el aula en la Lengua de Señas Colombiana (LSC). Los resultados muestran que la jerarquía de unidades propuesta por estos autores, lección, transacción, intercambio, movimiento y actos, también se pueden identificar en el discurso en LSC. Sin embargo, ha habido que agregar algunas desviaciones con respecto al modelo original, así como algunos elementos nuevos, requeridos al parecer por la naturaleza viso-gestual de la lengua y por las especificidades culturales de la interacción en clase a través de la misma. El artículo termina con algunas recomendaciones para mejorar el discurso en señas utilizado por los maestros oyentes a los que les falta fluidez.