Positioning and ethical issues in SL research

This presentation gives a behind-the-scenes account of sign language research, focusing on methodological approaches. I will discuss my current work on the impact of International Sign in Portuguese Sign Language (LGP), reflecting on how I navigate the dual role of being both a member of the Portuguese Deaf community and an academic researcher.

Initially, my study aimed to collect personal narratives from deaf people, to analyse their stories’ structure. However, throughout the process, I realised that the approach adopted was not ideal. After re-evaluating the methodology, I opted to carry out ethnographic work in my own deaf community. By leaving aside their “prepared for the camera” stories, I gradually uncovered the impact of International Sign in their everyday communication.

Finally, I will talk about the ways in which scientific knowledge can be made accessible and meaningful to the Deaf community. This presentation offers a perspective that may resonate with or inspire other researchers working in the field of sign languages.

Bridging language research and inclusive practice: The importance of lexical databases  

To say that the development and provision of appropriate teaching and learning materials for studying English, diagnostic tools for learning disorders in children acquiring English, or resources to disseminate information in English for speakers of English requires a solid understanding of the structure, acquisition, and processing of the English language has the character of an entirely obvious statement. For any language then, an understanding of how the language is structured, learned, and processed should be of fundamental importance to the development and provision of critical educational and societal resources. In the language sciences, achieving this understanding requires scientific investigation from both linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives, which in turn requires corpora of language use and databases of important variables related e.g. to the lexicon (like frequency, age of acquisition, iconicity) and phonology (like frequency, neighborhood density, complexity). For small and minority languages, including sign languages, such corpora and databases are vastly underrepresented. In this talk, I describe recent work on database creation for DGS (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, German Sign Language) for lexical and phonological variables, including the development of a DGS-LEX, based on the ASL-LEX for American Sign Language. In addition, I discuss the potential uses of these databases and how their existence can promote the provision of resources and inclusive practices.

Measuring grammaticalisation cross-modally: insights from the CrossMoGram project.

Various researchers over the years have drawn attention to apparent similarities between sign languages (SLs) and Creole languages (CLs), such as Woodward (1973), Adone (2012) and Bakker (2015). Such claims are often based on observations of a few languages per type, without any systematic comparison based on data from a large sample of languages to prove or disprove these claims empirically. Meanwhile, large-scale typological studies on grammaticalisation have barely included CLs, and SLs are absent entirely (Bisang & Malchukov 2020, Narrog & Heine 2018): consequently, the current state of the art on grammaticalisation is incomplete and in need of substantial additional evidence from CLs and SLs.

The Cross-Modal Grammaticalisation project (CrossMoGram), seeks to address this gap through cross-modal research, producing a systematic, comparative analysis of segmental aspect markers in CLs and SLs for processes of grammaticalisation by comparing substantial amounts of data in the context of the world’s languages. On one hand, we examine aspect markers in several SLs, including Balinese Homesign (Indonesia), BISINDO (Indonesia), British SL, Israeli SL, Italian SL, Japanese SL, Sain (Jamaica), South Korean SL and Triestine SL (Italy). On the other hand, we use data on over 50 CLs from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS, https://apics-online.info/).

Of course, to do this successfully, we need a robust means of measuring grammaticalisation cross-modally! With a view to comparing CLs and SLs with the world’s non-creole spoken languages, we decided to apply the existing eight parameters devised by MAGRAM, the Mainz Grammaticalisation Project (Bisang & Malchukov 2020). These are semantic reduction, phonetic integrity, bondedness, paradigmaticity, paradigmatic and syntagmatic variability, decategorialisation, and allomorphy.

In this presentation, I discuss the theoretical implications of applying the MAGRAM parameters to SLs, and the adaptations that we have made. This includes adaptations to take into account modality-dependent phenomena, such as reduplication and the incorporation of timelines along the grammaticalisation pathway.

I also reflect on the way that we have done this work as a cross-modal, international team of deaf and hearing researchers, because this has provided a remarkable environment, allowing each of us to (re)consider the assumptions we brought to the project concerning our respective modalities.

Ultimately, the CrossMoGram project aims to determine the extent to which CLs and SLs show more instances of early-stage grammaticalisation (auxiliaries, free morphemes) and fewer examples of late-stage grammaticalisation (affixes, stem change) compared with non-creole spoken languages. Our findings so far suggest that both CLs and SLs have more late-stage grammaticalisation than is commonly assumed.

References

Adone, Dany (2012). http://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325.862

Bakker, Peter (2015). http://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.30.2.08bak

Bisang, Walter and Andrej Malchukov (2020). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110563146

Woodward, James (1973). https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.1973.0006

A bridge between research and education in Sign Language of the Netherlands: Experiences from a researcher

There is often a gap between academic research and educational practice, also in the field of linguistics and Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT). In this presentation, I will address this gap from the linguistic research side. Based on my own experiences, I give some examples of places in the Netherlands where research on NGT takes place, and whether and how research results find their way into practice. I explain some of the obstacles in research on sign languages, e.g. limited resources and scarce datasets. I also mention some aspects within NGT education that seem to receive little attention within the research field, such as the effectiveness of teaching methods in more challenging situations. Finally, I give examples of elements that, in my experience, work as a link between science and practice.

A bridge between research and education in Dutch Sign Language: Experiences from a teacher (NGT)

I work as a lecturer of Dutch Sign Language at the BA program in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. In my presentation, I will explore together with you how we can bridge scientific research and education in sign language within our department.

In our department, research and teaching go hand in hand. Typically, scientific research is published in academic journals, but how can we ensure that these findings effectively reach the classroom? In my NGT classes, I incorporate linguistic topics such as language acquisition, grammatical elements, and communication. I often teach by providing numerous practical examples, thereby integrating theory with practice. However, this approach is only possible if research outcomes are accessible. Therefore, making research results available to lecturers, students, and sign language users is essential for our Sign Language Linguistics department. Conversely, education itself serves as a valuable source for research, as new research questions frequently emerge from classroom challenges. Thus, valorization becomes a reciprocal process.

The Interplay of Manual and Nonmanual Markers of Negation in Turkish Sign Language (TİD): A Corpus-Based Analysis

This study investigates the frequency and distribution of markers of negation in Turkish Sign Language (TİD), focusing on the interaction between manual and nonmanual markers (NMMs). Negation, a universal linguistic phenomenon (Dahl, 1979, 2010), demonstrates significant variation across signed languages (SLs), revealing unique typological patterns (Zeshan, 2006). All SLs studied to date employ manual markers and NMMs of negation, but how these interact is subject to language-specific patterns: while some SLs mainly employ NMMs (e.g., headshake), others have been shown to rely mainly on manual negators. TİD has traditionally been classified as a SL of the latter type, i.e., a manual dominant SL (Zeshan, 2006). The present study reconsiders this claim, based on a much larger data set from the TİD corpus (Dikyuva et al., 2017) than used in previous studies (Gökgöz, 2011; Zeshan, 2006).

The corpus data for the current study consist of semi-structured dialogues on everyday events collected from TİD signers across Turkey between 2015-2017 (Dikyuva et al., 2017). Out of the previously annotated utterances (54,806 sign tokens) from 66 signing pairs, we identified and coded 1,418 negative clauses. Coding these negative clauses for the presence/interplay of manual and/or NM negation markers yielded three categories: a) NM marking only (81 / 1,418 cases: 6%); b) manual marking only (149 / 1,418: 10%); and c) combined use of manual and NM markers (1,185 / 1,418 cases: 84%).

The annotated negative clauses were also coded following manual negators (including e.g. negative indefinites and modals). The most commonly annotated negator was ‘değil’ (‘not’), in both manual and nonmanual forms (492 cases, 34.8% of all negations). In 433 cases (88%), the manual sign DEĞİL was used in combination with a NMM (e.g., backwards head tilt; eyebrow raise, see Fig.1). In 11.4% of the cases, the particle DEĞİL occurred without NMMs (see Fig.2). In the remaining 0.6% of the cases, only NMMs were used to encode the semantic meaning of DEĞİL (as confirmed by native signers; see Fig.3), i.e., the manual component of DEĞİL was phonologically deleted.

The frequent co-occurrence of NMMs with manual negators – in general and in the case of DEĞİL – further suggests that TİD features a hybrid system, thus challenging the traditional dichotomy (Pfau, 2016; Zeshan, 2006). Further analysis of function will guide understanding of the role of NMMs in negative clauses and shed new light on discussions regarding the typology of TİD.