[Martin Taylor 2018/12/05/10/24]
Bruce,
I thought you might be interested in the attached analysis of
French Sign Language (FSL). It is a written-after-the-fact paper
based on a fascinating talk that Cuxac presented at the second
“Structure of Multimodal Dialogue” workshop that I co-organized
with Don Bouwhuis and Françoise Néel. It took years of persuasion
to get anything in writing from him, and the result was in French,
which had to be translated into English by my Dutch co-organizer
and co-editor. I’m not sure whether “Iconicity” is the best
possible word, since it implies to me something static and
concrete being imaged, whereas Cuxac is dealing with fluidly
relating abstractions as well. But I can’t think of a better word.
I’m sending it because I don’t imagine you have easy access to the
book.
Cuxac discusses the role of gaze and rapid back and forth changes
of gaze direction in adjusting viewpoints. Senghas and Coppola
(2001) does not deal with gaze at all, concentrating on gross body
placements, but in
gaze direction is marked. Maybe one or other of the Senghas’s
(father and daughter?) treats it in a different publication. It is
not mentioned in the linked page whether gaze is used as Cuxac
describes, to make the FSL signer “become” the subject of an
embedded clause, but it would be interesting to know whether the
Nicaraguan community has developed a technique like the French
(and according to Cuxac the international signing community) to
accommodate your speculation:.
Anyway, I thought Cuxac's presentations, both oral (which
included a funny story told in FSL about, as I remember, a
shipwreck and the activity of the captain) and written, quite
fascinating. It’s interesting that both Cuxac and the Nicaraguan
researchers say that it is difficult if not impossible to make
word for word translations into spoken or written language.
Instead, you have to retranscribe the story at a deeper level.
What would “This is the house that Jack built” mean? One might
think “* Here is an object [place object]. This object is a
house. {Become Jack} I [past] build [placed object* ]”, which
tells the same story in about four signs. The problem I see is how
“Jack” would be signed. I suppose there’s a way to do that. But
this is all a pure guess, since I know nothing of sign languages
other than what I learned from Cuxac and from the links in this
thread.
I hope it interests you as much as it did me.
Martin
Cuxac2000.pdf (5.74 MB)
···
http://www.nicaraguansignlanguageprojects.org/Projects_Now_and_Future.html * It
may be that these signers cannot recite “This is the house that
Jack built” because there are too many distinct same-reference
links in the chain. The song “I am my own grandpa” may be
inaccessible to them unless they have writing as a bridge to the
metalanguage capacities of spoken language*
On 2018/12/3 12:09 PM, Bruce Nevin
( via csgnet Mailing List) wrote:
Repeating context fromBruce Nevin
2018-12-03_14:36:33
UTC in a parallel
thread: interviews
with researchers in
this podcast suggest that language has a more
fundamental and
essential role in
cognition than I had
realized, stitching
together what are
disparate ‘islands’
of perception in
animals, small
children, and (a
startling story!) in
adults who lack
language.Â
I followed up thestory in the podcast
about the role of 8
to 10 year olds in
creating a new
language de novo.
The story: In 1977, a specialeducation center
for congenitally
deaf children was
established in
Managua,
Nicaragua. Prior
to that, deaf
children were with
their separated
families, and each
developed
idiosyncratic
‘home signs’ to
communicate basic
needs. From 50 in
1977, the school
population had
grown to 100 in
1979, the year of
the Sandinista
revolution. In
1980, the
Democratic
Socialist
government opened
a vocational
school for deaf
adolescents, and
the population in
the two school had
increased to over
400. Like
Alexander Graham
Bell, they were
sold on ‘oralism’
vs. ‘signing’ (two
battling camps in
the world of
pedagogy for the
deaf), but they
had only very
limited success
teaching lip
reading, and their
students just
didn’t get what
Spanish was
about.Â
However,they were not
prohibited from
signing among
themselves, and
over time their
disparate ‘home
sign’ ways
converged into a
common way of
signing.Â
"By combining gestures andelements of
their home-sign
systems, a pidgin -like
form and a creole -like
language rapidly
emerged. They
were creating
their own
language. This
“first-stage”
pidgin has been
called * Lenguaje de Signos
Nicaragüense*  (LSN) and is still used
by many who
attended the
school at this
time." (Wikipedia)
(You willpresently see the
significance in
this story that
those early
attenders still
use this primitive
pidgin 40 years
later, despite
exposure to later
developments.)
The staffcouldn’t
understand what
the children were
saying, but they
didn’t ask for
help until 1986,
when they called
on a sign language
linguist from MIT,
Judy Kegl.
By thattime, there had
been 9
‘generations’ of
incoming students
since the 50 in
1977, 6Â
‘generations’
since the 400 in
1980. The annual
arrival of
newly-exposed
children is
crucial to this
story, especially
those under age
10.
(Coincidentally,Zellig Harris’s
daughter Eva had
already been
working in
Nicaragua for
several years.
She’s a microbiologist at U.C. Berkeley still working
in Nicaragua, now
focused especially
on the virus that
causes Dengue
fever, and more
broadly on
sophisticated
low-budget public
health in
developing
countries. She’s
married to a
Nicaraguan. We’ll
get to the significance  of
t his
coincidence
presently.)
Other linguists after Dr. Kegl havegot involved.
References that
I’ve listed at the
end of this post
describe how they
have observed the
refinement and
sophistication of
this pidgin sign
language progressively with each new generation
of children. In
brief:
Signing
first were
close to the
miming done by
congenitally
deaf adults
who lack
language
(another part
of the
podcast).
These
relatively
large and
expressive/depictive
gestures
became more
compact,
stylized, and
conventionalized to signs with each generation.Children
age 10
innovate as
they learn the
sign language
of the
community that
they move
into.The
the focus of
the referenced
studies is the
emergence of * spatial
orientation* Â as
a modifier of
signs. This is
a well-known
feature of ASL
and other sign
languages that
have been
created by
people with
prior
knowledge of
language.
Signing before
the chest has
straightforward (so to speak) meaning, and the same sign to the right or
to the left
denotes a
modification
of the basic
sign.Orientation
indicate co-reference  of
two signs to
the same
individual or
to the same
temporal
context.
Hereby hangs
the central
entry point of
my particular
interest in
this.This side
information is
overloaded, in
that there is
no overt way
to distinguish
e.g. same
person from
same time, or
same person
from same
utensil that
the person was
using for
eating.ÂThis is
metalanguage
device–the
means for
signing about
signs
themselves (* this
present* Â sign
has the same
referent as * that
prior* Â sign)–is
not part of
the signing
system itself.
The
metalanguage
is separate
from the
language. And
it is because
it lacks
‘words’
(signs), but
rather is only
a modifier of
signs, its
capacity as a
metalanguage
is
impoverished.Worse,
channel for
information is
also
overloaded for
anotehr
reason. It is
used for
purely
expressive
purposes, e.g.
turning
rhythmically
from side to
side in the
progress of a
narrative.
In natural language, the metalanguageis part of the
language. We can
use words to refer
to words and to
assert
co-reference and
the like. For
example, I could
say any of the
following, in
progressively more
explicit form:
I read the paper by Kocab et al.
I read the paper which is by Kocab et al.
I read a paper; it is by Kocab et al.
I read a paper; a paper (previous wordsame as a prior
word)Â is by Kocab et al.
The last paraphrase is unnaturalbecause previous same as prior is
asserted
explicitly in
words, rather than
the immediately
previous
occurrence of paper  being
reduced to the
pronoun it  (which
carries the
metalanguage
information ‘same
as something said
nearby’), or being
reduced to the -ich  part
of which (which carries the metalanguage
information ‘same
as as a closely
preceding word’),
plus (by a longer
route) the
definite article
in the paper .
Even the which  can
be reduced to zero
because that
paraphrase
relation is
conventional and
the metalanguage
assertion of same
reference is
understood.
It may bethat these signers
cannot recite
“This is the house
that Jack built”
because there are
too many distinct
same-reference
links in the
chain. The song “I
am my own grandpa”
may be
inaccessible to
them unless they
have writing as a
bridge to the
metalanguage
capacities of
spoken language.
Now theparticular
personal
interest that
this story
sparked in
me. In 1994,
Terry
Langendoen’s
review of Zellig
Harris’s * Language
and
information: A
mathematical
approach* Â was
published in the
journal of the
Linguistic
Society of
America:
Langendoen,D. T. 1994.
Review of A
Theory of
Language and
Information: A
Mathematical
Approach by
Zellig Harris.
Language, Vol.
70, No. 3
(Sep., 1994),
pp. 585-588.
At theend, breaking
abruptly from
the general
tenor and flow
of his review,
he  wrote:
... theconcluding
paragraph of
section 10.7,
‘Non-linguistic systems; music’, says something so outrageous that I am
compelled to
quote it in
its entirety
(318):
'Finally,it seems that
the sign
language of
the deaf does
not have an
explicit
operator-argument
partial
ordering, nor
an internal
metalanguage,
but rests upon
a direct
juxtaposition
of the
relevant
referents.
This applies
to autonomous
sign
languages,
developed by
the deaf
without
instruction
from people
who know
spoken
language.
Lestthere be any
doubt about
the
implications
of this
paragraph, by
‘internal
metalanguage’
Harris means
the sentences
which
constitute the
grammar of the
language
(359).
Harris was clearly referring to theendogenous sign
language in
Nicaragua, which
he had  learned about from his daughter Eva
Harris. The
discussion so
far has been
about the
absence of a
metalanguage
that is part of
the language
itself. The
further part
about an
explicit
operator-argument
partial ordering
suggests to me
that in this
sign language
they couldn’t
have a “he
said-she said”
conversation, or
to remark that
they once
thought thus and
so but because
of such and such
have concluded
that so and so
did it. The sign
language would
have to haveÂ
acquired the
capacity to have
one verb assert
something about
another (" an explicit operator-argument partial
ordering"),
probably, but
maybe not
provably, from
their
instruction in
Spanish language
literacy.
References to follow up:
Ageneral
discussion,
like the above
linked
Wikipedia
article:[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sign-language](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sign-language)Â
Senghas,A., &
Coppola, M.
(2001).
Children
Creating
Language: How
Nicaraguan
Sign Language
Acquired a
Spatial
Grammar.
Psychological
Science,
12(4),
323–328. doi:
10.1111/1467-9280.00359
There's a paywall there; it's postedhere:
http://ling.umd.edu/~omaki/teaching/Ling240_Summ2007/Senghas%26Coppola01_NicaraguanSL.pdf
That was 2001. More recent:
Senghas, Ann. 2011. The Emergence ofTwo Functions
for Spatial
Devices in
Nicaraguan
Sign Language
Hum Dev. 2011
Jan; 53(5):
287–302. doi:Â
[10.1159/000321455]
Kocab,Annemarie, Pyers, Jennie, &
Senghas, Ann. (2015). Referential
shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language:
a transition from lexical to
spatial devices. Front Psychol.
2014; 5: 1540. Published online
Jan 9. doi:Â
[10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01540]