Search results for "SIGN LANGUAGE"

Agreement or no agreement. ERP correlates of verb agreement violation in German Sign Language

2018

Previous studies on agreement violation in sign languages report neurophysiological responses similar to those observed for spoken languages. In contrast, the two current event-related potential studies (ERP) on agreement violations in German Sign Language sentences present results that allow for an alternative explanation. In experiment A, we investigated the processing of agreement verbs ending in an unspecified location different to the location associated with the referent. Incorrect agreement verbs engendered a posterior positivity effect (220–570 ms post nonmanual cues) and a left anterior effect (300–600 ms post the subsequent sign onset). In experiment B, we investigated a violation…

Head movements in Finnish Sign Language on the basis of Motion Capture data

2015

This paper reports a study of the forms and functions of head movements produced in the dimension of depth in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Specifically, the paper describes and analyzes the phonetic forms and prosodic, grammatical, communicative, and textual functions of nods, head thrusts, nodding, and head pulls occurring in FinSL data consisting of a continuous dialogue recorded with motion capture technology. The analysis yields a novel classification of the kinematic characteristics and functional properties of the four types of head movement. However, it also reveals that there is no perfect correspondence between form and function in the head movements investigated.

Iconic strategies in lexical sensory signs in Finnish Sign Language

2021

Abstract Iconic strategies—methods of making iconic forms—have been mostly considered in terms of concrete semantic fields such as actions and objects. In this article, I investigate iconic strategies in lexical sensory signs—signs that semantically relate to the five senses (sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste) and to emotions (e.g., anger)—in Finnish Sign Language. The iconic strategy types I discuss are hand-action, entity, drawing, and locating. I also discuss the indexical strategy type (e.g., finger pointing). To gain as rich and broad a view as possible, the mixed methods in the research consist of three components: intuition based, intersubjective, and statistical analyses. The ma…

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE IN SPOKEN AND SIGNED STORIES TOLD BY A DEAF CHILD WITH A COCHLEAR IMPLANT: WORDS, SIGNS OR PARALINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS?

2011

In this paper the use and quality of the evaluative language produced by a bilingual child in a story-telling situation is analysed. The subject, an 11-year-old Finnish boy, Jimmy, is bilingual in Finnish sign language (FinSL) and spoken Finnish. He was born deaf but got a cochlear implant at the age of five. The data consist of a spoken and a signed version of “The Frog Story”. The analysis shows that evaluative devices and expressions differ in the spoken and signed stories told by the child. In his Finnish story he uses mostly lexical devices – comments on a character and the character’s actions as well as quoted speech occasionally combined with prosodic features. In his FinSL story he…

Ellipsis in Finnish Sign Language

2013

This paper deals with syntactic ellipsis in clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). The point of departure for the paper is the observation, confirmed by several studies, that clauses in FinSL are often syntactically incomplete. Building on this, the paper first describes how all core-internal clausal material may be elided in FinSL: core arguments in clauses with a verbal nucleus, core-internal NPs in clauses with a nominal nucleus, and even nuclei themselves. The paper then discusses several grammatical contexts which especially favor ellipsis in FinSL. These are question–answer pairs, two-clause coordinated structures, topic–comment structures, blend structures, and structures containi…

Transitivity prominence within and across modalities

2020

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…

Review of Schulmeister & Reinitzer (2002): Progress in Sign Language Research. In Honor of Siegmund Prillwitz (Fortschritte in der Gebärdensprach…

2004

Variation in the use of constructed action according to discourse type and age in Finnish Sign Language

2022

This paper presents a study of the use of constructed action (CA) in the stories and conversations of adult Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) signers of different ages. CA is defined here as a type of depiction in which a signer enacts the actions, feelings, thoughts and utterances of discourse referents with different parts of their body. Most studies on CA in sign languages have been done on the basis of signed storytelling, and little is known about how the use of CA varies in different discourse types. The use of CA has also been noted to vary between individual signers, but we do not yet know much about the socio-individual phenomena that may be linked to this variation. In the present stu…

Agent defocusing in two-participant clauses in Finnish Sign Language

2019

This article investigates what strategies are used for defocusing the agent in two-participant clauses in FinSL. The question is approached by analyzing a set of data that consists of videotaped informational texts. Several strategies for agent defocusing were found. First, the agent can simply be omitted. Second, the agent can be expressed with a pronominal pointing sign used non-referentially. Pronominal pointing signs that can be used non-referentially include at least the non-first person plural pronominal pointing sign and the first person singular pointing sign, possibly also the first person plural pointing sign. This study also suggests that constructed action is an additional, opti…

Optimal reciprocals in German Sign Language

2003

Unlike most spoken languages, German Sign Language (DGS) does not have a single means of reciprocal marking. Rather, different strategies are used, which crucially depend on phonological (one-handed sign vs. two-handed sign) and morphosyntactic (plain verb vs. agreement verb) properties of the underlying verb. Moreover, with plain verbs DGS shows dialectal variation. Altogether there are four different ways of realizing reciprocal marking in DGS. In this paper, we compare a rule-based analysis for the reciprocal data (based on Brentari’s 1998 feature hierarchy) to an optimality-theoretic analysis. We argue that an OT-account allows for a more straightforward explanation of the facts. In par…