Formal Features in Sign Language Songs
Résumé
Chanted corpora are not easy to find in Sign Languages. This study is dedicated to a corpus of
songs sung in French by two native speakers and, at the very same time, signed in French Sign
Language (LSF) by another performer, fluent in LSF, who adapted the signed versions from the
French ones.
The first part of the talk (Aroui) proceeds to a metrical analysis of the French versions of the songs,
using metrical grids (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983). Syllable onsets are set to some of the musical
beats. These French songs make a semantic and rhythmical skeleton upon which the signed versions
of the songs are built, and help to identify the meter and the rhythm of the signed versions.
The second part of the talk (Martinod) concentrates on the LSF versions of the songs. Many
different parameters are used in signed languages: the hands (the dominant one being the right hand
for right-handed people), the facial expressions, the mouthings and the mouth gestures (a mouthing
imitates the position of the mouth when the French equivalent of the sign performed is pronounced;
mouth gestures are not related to this pronunciation), as well as movements of the head and
movements of the chest. Our aim is to study the way these parameters are set (or not) to the musical
meter.
If a complex sign is composed of many linguistic units, we can expect different movement onsets to
be aligned with different metrical beats. If the onsets of the second (and eventually third) parts of
the complex sign are not associated with some of the musical beats, then it can be argued that
complex signs, even if composed of many movements, are not necessarily the concatenation of
different linguistic (sub)units.
The few signs we were able to analyze revealed themselves to be clearly cut into smaller units to
match the beats: this cut is initiated by changes in the movement (lengthening change or repetition)
or by the reduplication of a simple sign.