Project Details
Projekt
Exploring the limits of simultaneity: Encoding caused change-of-state events with classifier constructions German Sign Language (DGS)
Applicant
Dr. Cornelia Loos
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502009339
While sign languages share fundamental properties with natural spoken languages on all levels of description (Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006), they also display properties that are different because sign languages employ exclusively the visual-gestural modality. An obvious difference that will be exploited in this project is that sign languages may coordinate two manual articulators (in addition to a range of non-manuals) to encode information about the simultaneous unfolding of events: Each hand can represent one event participant, and the simultaneous presence of both represents their parallel existence in space and time (Perniss, 2007). Simultaneity at various levels of linguistic description has received much attention in the research literature (Vermeerbergen et al., 2007), yet potential limitations to how much information can be encoded at the same time have been explored to a much lesser extent. This project investigates both linguistic and non-linguistic constraints limiting simultaneity in German Sign Language (DGS) expressions of complex events with simultaneously unfolding subevents. Specifically, I look at caused change-of-state (cos) events such as described in Mary hammered the spoon flat, where Mary's hammering brings about a change in the degree of flatness of the spoon. Hammering and flattening subevents thus go 'hand in hand' and we might expect them to be expressed in a temporally iconic fashion with one hand representing hammering and the other representing a spoon. Since the manipulation of an object's visually observable properties is most frequently represented via so-called classifier constructions (CC) in DGS and other sign languages, hence the focus will be on this construction type. CCs have been analyzed as containing both linguistic and gestural components (e.g. Davidson, 2015), thus a major contribution of the proposed project is to provide an empirically informed theoretical account of the linguistic vs. gestural properties of CCs in DGS. Using a series of corpus and experimental studies (production and acceptability), I will investigate how iconic motivation, physiological constraints, phonology and discourse-pragmatic constraints on event structure all interact to determine expressions of caused cos in sign languages vs. in gesture. The expected outcome is thus both to sharpen our understanding of how much simultaneity visual-gestural languages like DGS allow and to arrive at a model of simultaneous CCs.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
