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Article Dans Une Revue Frontiers in Psychology Année : 2023

Biological, cultural, and environmental factors catalyzing the emergence of (alternate) sign languages

Résumé

In the last decades, there has been a growing number of studies analyzing the extent to which and the mechanisms by which language-external factors affect particular aspects of the design of human language(s). Here I want to make a plea for what I consider are the clearest and most spectacular cases of language-external factors variably affecting language design. I argue that the choice of modality of a language (spoken/gestural) can be independently determined by (i) biological, (ii) cultural, and (iii) environmental factors. What is more, these will not be factors affecting cumulative diachronic language change, but rather language design ex nihilo —to the extent that these are “new” languages, i.e., not derived by regular diachronic change of the local oral language structures1. Thus, they constitute evidence against any a priori skeptical view on the possibility for language-external factors to substantially affect core aspects of the grammar of languages (see e.g., Benítez-Burraco and Moran, 2018 for discussion).
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hal-04387297 , version 1 (11-01-2024)

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Aritz Irurtzun. Biological, cultural, and environmental factors catalyzing the emergence of (alternate) sign languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 2023, 14, ⟨10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1224437⟩. ⟨hal-04387297⟩
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