Table Of Content

Nonmanuals in Sign Language Benjamins Current Topics Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of special issues of various journals have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim of finding new audiences for topically interesting material, bringing such material to a wider readership in book format. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/bct Volume 53 Nonmanuals in Sign Language Edited by Annika Herrmann and Markus Steinbach These materials were previously published in Sign Language & Linguistics 14:1 (2011) Nonmanuals in Sign Language Edited by Annika Herrmann Markus Steinbach University of Göttingen John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nonmanuals in sign language / edited by Annika Herrmann, Markus Steinbach. p. cm. (Benjamins Current Topics, issn 1874-0081 ; v. 53) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sign language--Grammar. I. Herrmann, Annika. II. Steinbach, Markus. HV2500.N66 2013 419--dc23 2013015230 isbn 978 90 272 0272 7 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7174 7 (Eb) © 2013 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Nonmanuals in sign languages 1 Annika Herrmann and Markus Steinbach Syntax and prosodic consequences in ASL: Evidence from multiple WH-questions 7 Sarah Churng Negation in Turkish Sign Language: The syntax of nonmanual markers 47 Kadir Gökgöz Eye gaze and verb agreement in German Sign Language: A first glance 73 Jana Hosemann Mouth gestures in British Sign Language: A case study of tongue protrusion in BSL narratives 91 Donna Lewin and Adam Schembri Nonmanual markings for topic constructions in Hong Kong Sign Language 111 Felix Sze Nonmanuals, semantic operators, domain marking, and the solution to two outstanding puzzles in ASL 143 Ronnie B. Wilbur Linguistics as structure in computer animation: Toward a more effective synthesis of brow motion in American Sign Language 175 Rosalee Wolfe, Peter Cook, John C. McDonald, and Jerry Schnepp Index 195 Video clips for this volume can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bct.53.video This logo marks the availability of a video file. Nonmanuals in sign languages Annika Herrmann and Markus Steinbach University of Göttingen 1. What do nonmanual articulators reveal about the grammar of sign languages? Recent research on sign languages has shifted the focus of interest from the manual articulators to so-called nonmanual articulators, which express a variety of important grammatical functions. All sign languages investigated so far have a wide range of nonmanual articulators at their disposal. Nonmanuals are defined as the actions produced by parts of the body other than the hands. Typical nonmanual articulators are the upper part of the body, the head, and the face includ- ing the mouth, the cheeks, the eyes, the eyebrows, and facial expressions. These nonmanuals are usually used simultaneously with both manual and other nonmanual markers. They accompany lexical signs or may align with syntactic or prosodic phrases (cf. Sandler 1999; Wilbur & Patschke 1999; Brentari & Crossley 2002; Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006; Dachkovsky & Sandler 2009; Herrmann 2012; Sandler 2012). Nonmanuals play an important role at all levels of sign language grammar. They express a variety of lexical, morphosyntactic, prosodic, semantic, and prag- matic functions such as attributive, adverbial, and aspectual modification, negation, sentence types, reported speech, constructed action, and information structuring. Nonmanuals have two interesting properties: They are multifunc- tional and they can be layered with both manual and other nonmanual markers. One specific nonmanual marker may express various grammatical functions and vice versa. This multifunctionality seems to be an inherent property of all kinds of nonmanuals. In addition, simultaneous layering of different articulatory channels exhibits a complex interplay between manuals and nonmanuals on the one hand and between different kinds of nonmanuals on the other (cf. Wilbur 2000; Pfau & Quer 2010). Most nonmanual markers are either loan elements from the surrounding (neighboring) spoken language (such as mouthings, cf. Boyes Braem & Sutton- Spence 2001) or they are grammaticalized gestures (such as specific facial 2 Annika Herrmann and Markus Steinbach expressions, raised eyebrows, and body shift, cf. Wilcox 2004; Pfau & Steinbach 2006, 2011). In sign languages, nonmanuals have become a genuine part of the grammatical system because the visual-manual modality, unlike the oral-auditory modality, offers the unique property to grammaticalize nonmanual and manual gestures. The reason for this is that gestures use the same articulatory channel that is also active in the production of signs, whereas spoken languages use a com- pletely different articulatory and perceptual system. Thus, manual and nonmanual gestures frequently used in communication cannot become an integral part of the grammatical system of spoken languages. In spoken languages, nonmanuals can only be used as co-speech gestures. Since in sign languages, nonmanuals and nonmanual gestures use the same articulatory channel, it is not always easy to tease apart linguistic and affective nonmanuals. However, there are some systematic differences between both kinds of nonmanuals. First of all, they differ in their scope and timing. Grammatical nonmanuals have clear on- and offsets, whereas affective nonmanuals are more gradual and inconsistent. Second, different facial muscles are used for the production of both types. And third, grammatical nonmanuals are aligned with constituent structures. By contrast, affective nonmanuals are not timed to occur parallel to specific signs or constituents (cf. Emmorey 1999; Reilly & Anderson 2002; Wilbur 2003). Since sign languages use many articulatorily and grammatically different nonmanual markers to express a wide range of functions, a thorough empirical description and theoretical analysis of the forms and the functions of nonmanuals in typologically different sign languages will give new insights into modality-specific and modality-independent aspects of natural languages. In addition, corpus studies, computer simulation, and experimental research on the acquisition, production, and processing of affective and grammatical nonmanuals will provide further insights into the specific grammatical, psychological, and neurobiological properties of nonmanuals in sign languages (cf. Corina et al. 1999; Atkinson et al. 2004; Zeshan 2004ab; Thompson et al. 2006; Hosemann, this volume; Wolfe et al., this volume). To get a comprehensive picture of nonmanuals in sign languages, (at least) the following questions have to be addressed: (i) How can these specific components of sign language grammar be formally and functionally distinguished and catego- rized? (ii) What are the lexical, syntactic, semantic, and prosodic restrictions and functions of nonmanuals? (iii) How do manual and nonmanual markers as well as different kinds of nonmanual markers interact? (iv) Why do signers show some variation and optionality in the use of nonmanuals? (v) Why do sign languages use multiple appearances of nonmanuals to express specific functions? (vi) What is the typological variation with respect to form and function of nonmanuals? (vii) How can nonmanuals be analyzed at the interfaces between prosody, syntax, Nonmanuals in sign languages 3 semantics, and pragmatics? (viii) What are the differences between grammatical nonmanuals used in sign languages and affective nonmanuals used in spoken and sign languages? (ix) How are nonmanuals acquired, produced, and processed? (x) How can nonmanuals be elicited, and how can corpus data containing nonmanuals be transcribed, annotated, and statistically evaluated? (xi) How do nonmanuals emerge, and what does this tell us about the design of the interface between ges- ture and grammar in sign and spoken languages? 2. Content of this book This collected volume is an updated version of a special issue of Sign Language & Linguistics (14:1). The articles are based on presentations given at the confer- ence ‘Nonmanuals in Sign Languages (NISL)’, held in April 2009 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. They take up many of the topics mentioned in the previous section and discuss various formal and functional properties of nonmanuals in different sign languages from different perspectives. As a collection of original papers on empirical, theoretical, experimental, and applied aspects of nonmanuals, this book contributes findings and arguments that will foster future studies and discussions. The first contribution ‘Syntactic and prosodic consequences in ASL: Evidence from multiple WH-questions’ by Sarah Churng investigates the syntax and prosody of three multiple wh-constructions in American Sign Language (ASL) and presents new generalizations to characterize their prosody. Churng proposes that multiple wh-questions in ASL involve Parallel Merge structures and she argues that A-bar movement triggers prosodic breaks and ‘prosodic re- sets’. In his paper ‘Negation in Turkish Sign Language: The syntax of nonmanual markers’, Kadir Gökgöz presents a detailed description of the interaction of manual and nonmanual markers in negative sentences in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili, TİD). He argues that in TİD, certain (syntactic) nonmanuals are used to mark the syntactic domain of negation. Jana Hosemann in her contribution ‘Eye gaze and verb agreement in German Sign Language: A first glance’ presents the findings of a pilot eye-tracking study on the correlation of eye gaze and manual agreement in German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS). The results show that in DGS, unlike in ASL, eye gaze does not co-occur systematically with agreeing verbs. Nevertheless, the study can be taken as evidence that also in DGS there is a dependency relation between eye gaze and manual agreement. The contribution ‘Mouth gestures in British Sign Language: A case study of tongue protrusion in BSL narratives’ by Donna Lewin and Adam Schembri investigates the claim that in British Sign Language (BSL), tongue