The alignment of head nods with syntactic units in Finnish Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language
In this paper we examine the relationship between specific head movement events – head nods, often treated as prosodic boundary markers – and syntactic units in Finnish (FinSL) and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). In the study we investigated the alignment of head nods with syntactic units on the basis of a total of 20 (10+10) FinSL and SSL narratives. The results of the study show that in both languages head nods appeared similarly on syntactic boundaries and that the tendency was to align nods sentence-finally. However, not all head nods behaved this way: for example, a relatively large number of head nods were also found to occur sentence-initially or elsewhere in the sentence. Furthermore, …
Transitivity prominence within and across modalities
The idea of transitivity as a scalar phenomenon is well known (e.g., Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). However, as with most areas of linguistic study, it has been almost exclusively studied with a focus on spoken languages. A rare exception to this is Kimmelman (2016), who investigates transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL) on the basis of corpus data. Kimmelman attempts to establish a transitivity prominence hierarchy of RSL verbs, and compares this ranking to the verb meanings found in the ValPal database (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Bradley 2013). He arrives at the conclusion that using the frequency of overt objects in corpus data is a successful measure o…
On the rhythm of head movements in Finnish and Swedish Sign Language sentences
This paper investigates, with the help of computer-vision technology, the similarities and differences in the rhythm of the movements of the head in sentences in Finnish (FinSL) and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). The results show that the movement of the head in the two languages is often very similar: in both languages, the instances when the movement of the head changes direction were distributed similarly with regard to clause-boundaries, and the contours of the roll (tilting-like) motion of the head during the sentences were similar. Concerning differences, direction changes were found to be used more effectively in the marking of clause-boundaries in FinSL, and in SSL the head moved near…
A cross-linguistic comparison of reference across five signed languages
AbstractDo signers of different signed languages establish and maintain reference the same way? Here we compare how signers of five Western deaf signed languages coordinate fully conventionalized forms with more richly improvised semiotics to identify and talk about referents of varying agency. The five languages (based on a convenience sample) are Auslan, Irish Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language, Norwegian Sign Language, and Swedish Sign Language. Using ten retellings ofFrog, Where Are You?from each language, we analyze tokens of referring expressions with respect to: (a) activation status (new vs. maintained vs. re-introduced); (b) semiotic strategy (e.g., pointing sign, fingerspelling,…