The alignment of head nods with syntactic units in Finnish Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language

Puupponen, Anna; Jantunen, Tommi; Mesch, Johanna

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2016-35

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…It is argued here that the logical reason for this is that when signers do not use CA, the movements and positions of the head, such as nods, can be used to serve other functions, such as the prosodic function of indicating clause boundaries (e.g. Puupponen et al 2015;Puupponen et al 2016). Head nods also function as signals for emphasis and affirmation, both traditional ingredients of reporting discourse (Puupponen et al 2015).…”

Section: The Effect Of Ca On Non-manual Activitymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…However, as linguistic work on FinSL, and especially on its clauses, has progressed (Jantunen 2016, Jantunen 2017Puupponen et al 2016), it has become evident that a specific investigation of CA can no longer be postponed, partly because of the salient use of CA in the recently compiled FinSL corpus Salonen et al 2016). Consequently, in line with international studies, this paper sets out to analyze the use of CA with the clauses of FinSL.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

Jantunen

2017

Open Linguistics

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This paper investigates the interplay of constructed action and the clause in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Constructed action is a form of gestural enactment in which the signers use their hands, face and other parts of the body to represent the actions, thoughts or feelings of someone they are referring to in the discourse. With the help of frequencies calculated from corpus data, this article shows firstly that when FinSL signers are narrating a story, there are differences in how they use constructed action. Then the paper argues that there are differences also in the prototypical structure, linkage type and non-manual activity of clauses, depending on the presence or non-presence of constructed action. Finally, taking the view that gesturality is an integral part of language, the paper discusses the nature of syntax in sign languages and proposes a conceptualization in which syntax is seen as a set of norms distributed on a continuum between a categorial-conventional end and a gradient-unconventional end.

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Section: The Effect Of Ca On Non-manual Activitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

Jantunen

2017

Open Linguistics

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“…The corpus narratives consist of altogether 12 retellings of two picture-books, The Snowman, and Frog, where are you?, by signers between the ages of 20 and 60, recorded in a dialogue setting with multiple cameras (e.g. Jantunen et al 2016b;Puupponen et al 2016;. The overall duration of the material is 45 minutes and 12 seconds and it has been annotated in ELAN for manual signs and sentences, syntactic structure, head movement types, and torso movement types (Jantunen et al 2016b;Puupponen et al 2016;.…”

Section: An Overview Of the Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Secondly, Peirce's semiotics is very suitable for investigating a phenomenon that includes a lot of social and situational variation. It has been shown that the ways in which signers move their head while signing varies a great deal between different signers and different discourse strategies (Puupponen et al 2016;Jantunen 2017;, and that the movements of individual signers do not form distinct formal categories but, instead, head movement types such as a nod or a thrust may be described as prototypes that the actual head movement events in the discourse resemble more or less (Puupponen et al 2015). In actual language use, movements occur that share features with, for example, both the prototypical nod and the prototypical thrust, and which therefore are examples of the gradient periphery between different head movement types (ibid.).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards understanding nonmanuality: A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements

Puupponen

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers' head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements-such as nodding and shaking the head-may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity as well as different degrees of control in their production and interpretation. The treatment of head movements is extended to a discussion of semiotic versatility in the signification of actions of a signer's body, as well as to the treatment of nonmanuals in the theoretical description of sign languages. Finally, the paper presents a perspective on nonmanuals in which different nonmanual cues are examples of how signification, and human cognition in general, are closely connected to the embodied experience of existing and navigating in the physical and social world around us.

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“…In the corpus, it can appear in negated or non-negated clauses alike and even combine sequentially with HS in both, as in (32) and (33). The distribution and function of nodding in SLs does warrant further investigation and analysis in its own right because it may well carry more functional weight in SLs, such as helping to signal the end of clauses (Puupponen et al 2016). However a detailed discussion of nodding is beyond the scope of this study.…”

Section: Nodding In Negated Clausesmentioning

confidence: 93%

A corpus-based study of the role of headshaking in negation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language): Implications for signed language typology

Johnston

2018

Linguistic Typology

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Signed languages have been classified typologically as being manual dominant or non-manual dominant for negation. In the former negation is conveyed primarily by manual lexical signs whereas in the latter negation is primarily conveyed by nonmanual signs. In support of this typology, the site and spread of headshaking in negated clauses was also described as linguistically constrained. Headshaking was thus said to be a formal part of negation in signed languages so it was linguistic, not gestural. This paper aims to establish the role of headshaking in negation in Auslan with reference to this typology. In this corpus-based study, I show that Auslan users almost always negate clauses using a manual negative sign. Although headshakes are found in just over half of these manually negated clauses, the position and spreading behaviour of headshakes do not appear to be linguistically constrained. I also show that signers use headshakes as the sole negating element in a clause extremely rarely. I conclude that headshaking in Auslan appears similar to headshaking in the ambient face-to-face spoken language, English. I explore the implications of these findings for the proposed typology of negation in signed languages in terms of the type of data that were used to support it, and assumptions about the relationship between gesture and signed languages that underlie it.

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The alignment of head nods with syntactic units in Finnish Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

Towards understanding nonmanuality: A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements

A corpus-based study of the role of headshaking in negation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language): Implications for signed language typology

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