Visible Cohesion: A Comparison of Reference Tracking in Sign, Speech, and Co‐Speech Gesture

Perniss, Pamela M.; Özyürek, Aslı

doi:10.1111/tops.12122

Cited by 59 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…In order to capture potential language or modality specificities, the present study considers the full range of referential expressions that occurred in the data. This is similar to a recent study by Perniss and Özyürek (2015) who looked at referring expressions in German Sign Language, DGS, as well as in German speech/gesture. Here we not only investigate the referential function of nouns and pronouns, and zero anaphora, but, as a novel contribution to the ASL literature, we also analyze different classifier and different zero anaphora types, as well as the varying roles of space within the category of zero anaphora.…”

Section: The Present Studysupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Signers need to create coherent narrative and discourse just as speakers do. Yet few studies have investigated this question for sign languages (Wulf et al, 2002; Swabey, 2002, 2011; Morgan, 2006; McKee et al, 2011; Perniss and Özyürek, 2015). The first studies to investigate this question have primarily looked at variable subject presence, that is, overt versus null subjects, in Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language (McKee et al, 2011), and American Sign Language (Wulf et al, 2002).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Frederiksen

Mayberry

2016

Lingua

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Discussions of reference tracking in spoken languages often invoke some version of a referential hierarchy. In this paper, we asked whether this hierarchy applies equally well to reference tracking in a visual language, American Sign Language, or whether modality differences influence its structure. Expanding the results of previous studies, this study looked at ASL referential devices beyond nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphora. We elicited four simple narratives from eight native ASL signers, and examined how the signers tracked reference throughout their stories. We found that ASL signers follow general principles of the referential hierarchy proposed for spoken languages by using nouns for referent introductions, and zero anaphora for referent maintenance. However, we also found significant differences such as the absence of pronouns in the narratives, despite their existence in ASL, and differential use of verbal and constructed action zero anaphora. Moreover, we found that native signers’ use of classifiers varied with discourse status in a way that deviated from our expectations derived from the referential hierarchy for spoken languages. On this basis, we propose a tentative hierarchy of referential expressions for ASL that incorporates modality specific referential devices.

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Section: The Present Studysupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Frederiksen

Mayberry

2016

Lingua

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“…One of the distinctive characteristics of sign languages is the fact that they make extensive use of the space around the signer for referential purposes, apparently to a greater extent and in different ways than nonsigners do when using co-speech gesture (e.g., Perniss and Özyürek 2015). There are thought to be two main types of space used for this purpose which we will refer to here as 'motivated' versus 'arbitrary.'…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Cormier¹,

Fenlon²,

Schembri³

2015

Open Linguistics

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Sign languages have traditionally been described as having a distinction between (1) arbitrary (referential or syntactic) space, considered to be a purely grammatical use of space in which locations arbitrarily represent concrete or abstract subject and/or object arguments using pronouns or indicating verbs, for example, and (2) motivated (topographic or surrogate) space, involving mapping of locations of concrete referents onto the signing space via classifier constructions. Some linguists have suggested that it may be misleading to see the two uses of space as being completely distinct from one another. In this study, we use conversational data from the British Sign Language Corpus (www.bslcorpusproject.org) to look at the use of space with modified indicating verbs -specifically the directions in which these verbs are used as well as the co-occurrence of eyegaze shifts and constructed action. Our findings suggest that indicating verbs are frequently produced in conditions that use space in a motivated way and are rarely modified using arbitrary space. This contrasts with previous claims that indicating verbs in BSL prototypically use arbitrary space. We discuss the implications of this for theories about grammaticalisation and the role of gesture in sign languages and for sign language teaching.

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“…A short movie that was shown to participants in two parts was used to elicit narratives (Perniss & Özyürek, 2015). In the movie three female protagonists were silently engaged in a cooking activity in a kitchen.…”

Section: Stimulus Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is they use the visual modality to maintain discourse cohesion, i.e., to mark the accessibility of the referents in discourse (Debreslioska, Özyürek, Gullberg, & Perniss, 2013;Gullberg, 2006;Perniss & Özyürek, 2015;Yoshioko, 2008). Studies suggest that similar to speech, co-speech gestures, the meaningful movements of the hands that accompany speech, are sensitive to referential context in terms of the quantity of marking material (Gullberg, 2003(Gullberg, , 2006Levy & Fowler 2000;McNeill & Levy, 1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Discourse management

Azar

Özyürek

2015

DuJAL

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Speakers achieve coherence in discourse by alternating between differential lexical forms e.g. noun phrase, pronoun, and null form in accordance with the accessibility of the entities they refer to, i.e. whether they introduce an entity into discourse for the first time or continue referring to an entity they already mentioned before. Moreover, tracking of entities in discourse is a multimodal phenomenon. Studies show that speakers are sensitive to the informational structure of discourse and use fuller forms (e.g. full noun phrases) in speech and gesture more when re-introducing an entity while they use attenuated forms (e.g. pronouns) in speech and gesture less when maintaining a referent. However, those studies focus mainly on non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English, German and French). The present study investigates whether the same pattern holds for pro-drop languages. It draws data from adult native speakers of Turkish using elicited narratives. We find that Turkish speakers mostly use fuller forms to code subject referents in re-introduction context and the null form in maintenance context and they point to gesture space for referents more in re-introduction context compared maintained context. Hence we provide supportive evidence for the reverse correlation between the accessibility of a discourse referent and its coding in speech and gesture. We also find that, as a novel contribution, third person pronoun is used in re-introduction context only when the referent was previously mentioned as the object argument of the immediately preceding clause.

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Visible Cohesion: A Comparison of Reference Tracking in Sign, Speech, and Co‐Speech Gesture

Cited by 59 publications

References 39 publications

Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

Discourse management

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