Iconic variables

Schlenker, Philippe; Lamberton, Jonathan; Santoro, Michael D.

doi:10.1007/s10988-013-9129-1

Cited by 71 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This view is supported by the fact that structural iconicity has been observed across a wide range of sign language phenomena including the representation of plurals by reduplication (39), of pronouns by using pointing signs toward structured areas of space (8,9,40,41), of agreement markers (9), as well as of metaphors (42,43), and thus may be a general property of signing systems. Moreover, the precise nature of the mapping biases that sign languages appear to use suggests an iconic and nonarbitrary mapping between telic structure and visual structure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…meaning visibility can also encompass more subtle elements of meaning (7,8). For example, recent sign language research has proposed that sign languages sometimes use systems of "structural iconicity," in which properties of denotations are preserved by geometric properties of signs (8,9,13,14).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the study of spoken language, it is generally difficult to find compelling evidence for universally accessible units of meaning because although such elements may be present, they may also lack an overt morphological marking that would provide visible proof of their existence (6)(7)(8)(9).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sign languages have much in common with spoken languages in that they are complex, diverse, and rich in their morphosyntactic structure (10), and their use is supported by similar neural circuitry to that used in spoken languages (11,12). In at least some cases, sign languages overtly mark certain elements of meaning that can be morphologically hidden in spoken language (8,9,13,14). Here we exploit this tendency of sign languages to ask whether knowledge of how to map "event telicity" (explained further below) into visual signs may be universal and therefore (i) be encoded similarly across a range of sign languages with diverse historical origins and (ii) be accessible even by nonsigners lacking experience with sign languages.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Strickland

Geraci

Chemla

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Strickland

Geraci

Chemla

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…• How can we incorporate arbitrariness and iconicity in formal theories of language? (Schlenker, Lamberton & Santoro 2013;Wilcox & Xavier 2013;Davidson 2015) • What are the roles of iconicity in language learning and communication? (Imai & Kita 2014;Laing 2014;Perniss & Vigliocco 2014) • Which cognitive and perceptual processes underlie iconic associations?…”

Section: In Conclusion: Challenges and Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Dingemanse

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics, and including onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in general linguistics and typology around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalisation, work on ideophones has made an impact in many areas of linguistics, from theories of phonological features to typologies of manner and motion, and from sound symbolism to sensory language. Due to their hybrid nature as gradient vocal gestures that grow roots in discrete linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesises past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.

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Morphology in Sign Languages

Pfau,

Steinbach

2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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Sign languages show the same range of morphological processes as spoken languages. Linguistic research on many different sign languages has identified various kinds of inflectional and derivational processes. At the same time, morphological processes in sign languages are subject to modality‐specific properties not found in spoken languages. The impact of the visual–spatial modality makes sign languages typologically more uniform than spoken languages. Three modality‐specific properties are especially relevant for the discussion of sign language morphology: (i) the simultaneous realization of morphosyntactic features; (ii) the interaction of morphology with phonology in the overt realization of these features; and (iii) the impact of gestures on morphological processes. This entry does not provide a comprehensive survey of all morphological phenomena attested in sign languages. It discusses instead three prominent and well‐investigated inflectional processes – agreement, classifiers and nominal plural – and shows how different generative theories (minimalist program, Distributed Morphology, and Optimality Theory) can account for the modality‐independent as well as for the modality‐specific properties of inflection in sign languages. Still, we also point out that classical generative theories developed for spoken languages probably need to be supplemented by a gestural component to account for the impact of gestures on sign language morphology. The main goal of this entry is to exemplify how far morphological processes in sign languages can contribute to a broader understanding of morphological typology and theory.

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Iconic variables

Cited by 71 publications

References 17 publications

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Morphology in Sign Languages

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