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Autre Publication Scientifique Année : 2016

Variation in Sign Languages, a Cross-Linguistic Study of One Component of Gestural Units

Résumé

Scientific literature on sign languages (SL) observed a high degree of structural similarity between SLs which is more important than the similarity between spoken languages (e.g. Newport and Supalla, 2000). Various reasons have been advanced in order to explain this low variation : the claimed youth of SLs or their use of the visual-gestural modality. Recently, the assumption that SLs show a lower variation has been put into perspective because of the little number of studied SLs compared to the number of studied spoken languages. Some publications support the assumption that non occidental SLs and/or SLs used in rural areas would show a lot more variation than SLs previously described (Zeshan, 2008 ; De Vos et Pfau, 2015). Our goal is to contribute to refine this issue of variation and invariance between SLs. For this purpose, we will focus on one of the manual components of gestural units, the handshape, and we will compare its morphemic uses cross-linguistically. According to our theoretical framework, the Semiological Model (Cuxac, 2000 ; Cuxac and Sallandre 2007), each SL follows a similar semiogenetic scenario : an isolated deaf person communicates with a hearing person by iconicizing his sensorial and practical experience. By definition, these languages created by deaf people are monomodal. The visual-gestural modality’s strong potential of iconicity is then fully exploited in linguistic purposes. One of the consequences is that the smallest components of SLs, including the manual ones, are meaning-bearing and iconically grounded. This would imply a high rate of intra-modal linguistic similarities. Regardless their geographical origin and degree of communitisation, SLs would share a wide core of form-meaning manual components, among them the handshape parameter (the so-called classifiers). We will compare morphemic handshapes of five institutional SLs from different geographic areas (some of them are historically unrelated) and three individual SLs of deaf adults (Fusellier-Souza, 2006). In order to do so, we will study inventories of morphemic handshapes — handshapes associated with one or several semantic values — from the literature. Then, we will include data from a SL in the process of communitisation which is used in a rural area of Brazil and has never been described. These data were collected during a field survey in summer 2015. Our first results highlight a substantial similarity between the investigated SLs. Indeed, an impressive number of morphemic handshapes are used cross-linguistically with the exact same semantic values. It confirms the existence of a common structural core between SLs which seems to be a specificity of the visual-gestural languages. Not only providing the documentation of an unstudied SL and an original cross-linguistic comparison of a morphemic component, our study should also enrich our knowledge in the nascent area of typology of SLs.
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Dates et versions

hal-01709765 , version 1 (15-02-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01709765 , version 1

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Emmanuella Martinod. Variation in Sign Languages, a Cross-Linguistic Study of One Component of Gestural Units. 2016. ⟨hal-01709765⟩
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