28.1638, Review: Pragmatics: van den Bogaerde, Pfau, Baker, Schermer (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1638. Tue Apr 04 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.1638, Review: Pragmatics: van den Bogaerde, Pfau, Baker, Schermer (2016)

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Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2017 11:41:49
From: Franz Dotter [franz.dotter at uni-klu.ac.at]
Subject: The Linguistics of Sign Languages

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2820.html

EDITOR: Anne Edith Baker
EDITOR: Beppie van den  Bogaerde
EDITOR: Roland  Pfau
EDITOR: Trude  Schermer
TITLE: The Linguistics of Sign Languages
SUBTITLE: An introduction
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Franz Dotter, Universitat Klagenfurt

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

According to the foreword, “The Linguistics of Sign Languages”designed to be
an introductory textbook for sign language linguistics; some basic linguistic
knowledge is presupposed. The approach is twofold typological: In the interest
of comparison, Anne Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde, Roland Pfau & Trude
Schermer(all well known in The Netherlands) refer to different sign languages
around the world as well as to diverse spoken languages. 

The sequence of chapters is explained by first turning to the user (Chapters
1-3), then to grammar and lexicon (Chapters 4-11, starting from communicative
interaction ''down'' to phonetics/phonology), lastly to sociolinguistics
(Chapters 12-14). Except for the last chapter, the authors recommend to follow
this sequence in reading the book. At the end of every chapter, readers find a
summary, a ''Test Yourself'', an ''Assignments'' and a ''References and
further reading'' section. The book is accompanied by a website
(http://dx.doi/10.1075/z.199.website) which contains web resources (several
URLs of websites on languages/typology, transcription and glossing, sign
language dictionaries, databases/corpora, and manual alphabets),  answers to
the book's assignments, many videoclips of the examples presented in the book
and the book's references with information on their availability on the
internet.

Chapter 1 (Anne Baker: ''Sign languages as natural languages'') introduces the
important descriptive notions and basic subjects of sign language linguistics,
explains the method of presentation, and gives an overview of the book's
contents.

Chapter 2 (Trude Schermer & Roland Pfau: ''Psycholinguistics'') deals with
language in the brain (comprehension and production, including ''tips of the
finger slips''), presents a ''multiple-component model'' of memory and shows
comparable results for spoken and signed languages. The basis of presentation
is a mild modular model, distinguishing between a ''meaning lexicon'' (i.e.
lemmas) and a ''form lexicon'' (i.e. lexemes) as well as between grammatical
encoding which gives an ''abstract representation of a sentence'' (p. 43) and
the necessarily following ''phonological encoding'' (p. 46).

Chapter 3 (Anne Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde & Sonja Jansma:
''Acquisition'') shows the parallels between spoken and signed languages in
the course of an unrestricted acquisition, but also argues that the different
combinations of hearing or deaf parents and hearing or deaf children result in
very different - partially retarding - acquisition conditions. Bilingualism
and hearing aids (including cochlear implants) are also considered.

Chapter 4 (Anne Baker & Beppie van den Bogaerde: ''Interaction and
discourse'') describes the sign language-specific rules of communicative
interaction in discourse (cooperation, turn-taking), the production of
coherence as well as the functional use of information structure (topic, role
shift) and some pragmatic phenomena (''whispering'' and ''shouting'' in sign
language, hearing status of communication participants). 

Chapter 5 (Anne Baker & Roland Pfau: ''Constituents and word classes'') uses a
simple phrase structure model (p. 98) and describes word classes using the
categories known from spoken language research. If the existence of the
respective class seems not to be self-evident for sign languages, the authors
look for functional equivalents in sign languages. The readers find lexical
signs (nouns and verbs the formal distinction of which is not existent in
every sign language; adjectives and adverbs including non-manual modifiers)
and - the relatively few - function signs (INDEX in its functions of article
or pronoun, adpositions, conjunctions, modal and negation particles,
auxiliaries).

Chapter 6 (Roland Pfau & Heleen Bos: ''Syntax: simple sentences'') starts from
the four types of constituents (nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial),
then discusses their functions, valency, semantic/pragmatic roles, sign order
(basic and topicalized, order in nominal phrases), sentence types, doubling of
question and negation elements, pronominalization and the conditions of
pro-drop.

Chapter 7 (Roland Pfau: ''Syntax: complex sentences'') describes complement
clauses which are very rarely  overtly marked in sign languages. With speech
act verbs (''He said, that ...''), sign languages use role shift instead of
complement sentences. Then adverbial (temporal, causal and purpose,
conditional) and relative clauses, finally coordinated main sentences
(including ellipsis) are examined.

Chapter 8 (Trude Schermer: ''Lexicon'') describes the method of glossing,
iconicity of lexical signs, semantic phenomena like polysemy, homonymy,
antonymy and hyponymy, then metaphor and idiom.

Chapter 9 (Roland Pfau: ''Morphology'') illustrates the different relationship
between simultaneity and sequentiality in sign languages compared to spoken
languages and shows that phonological features - having no meaning as a
default in spoken languages - very often have to be interpreted as morphemes,
due to iconicity. The author discusses morphological processes like
compounding, derivation and inflection. Concerning the latter, he shows the
characteristic coding strategies of sign languages in the fields of tense and
aspect, agreement (the much discussed ''loci'' are integrated here),
pluralization, incorporation and classification.

Chapter 10 (Onno Crasborn & Els van der Kooij: ''Phonetics'') discusses the
modality differences between signed and spoken languages, related to
production and perception of signs. It shows that phonetic variation in sign
languages is in accordance to assumed general principles of articulation.
Short subchapters consider notation systems and language technology.

Chapter 11 (Els van der Kooij & Onno Crasborn: ''Phonology'') describes the
phonotactic rules for formational units, the role of frequency and markedness,
the properties and functions of the main parameters of signs, namely
handshape, orientation, location and movement. Subchapters are devoted to
non-manual elements, two-handed signs and prosody. In the subchapter on
phonological processes, the authors discuss assimilation, weak drop and
deletion, in the subchapter on iconicity they break iconicity down to the
level of single parameters.

Chapter 12 (Trude Schermer: ''Language variation and standardization'') starts
from the regional  variation of sign languages and its sources (rather
isolated early signing communities and former deaf schools) and discusses
special conditions of sign language use in speaking majorities as well as the
status and recognition of sign languages. Related to language policy, the
author describes directed and non-directed standardization processes as well
as the necessary invention of new signs in the interest of education and
training, in order to overcome the historical discrimination of deaf people in
education.

Chapter 13 (Trude Schermer & Roland Pfau: ''Language contact and change'')
describes sign languages in history and possible language families, then turns
to diachronic change, as far as it can be proven due to the partial lack of
historical documents, discussing grammaticalization and lexicalization.
Concerning language contact, the special situation of contact between speaking
and signing communities with its consequences of communication systems like
Signed English, code-switching, -mixing and -blending is considered. Contact
between signing communities is described by borrowings and loan signs,
followed by a short note on ''International Sign''. 

Chapter 14 (Beppie van den Bogaerde, Marjolein Buré & Connie Fortgens:
''Bilingualism and deaf education'') starts with a description of several
types of bilingualism, then turns to the history of deaf education and
discusses several aspects of bilingual education as the actually accepted
education practice.

Notation conventions are given in Appendix 1, followed by one example each for
one- and two-handed manual alphabets (Appendix 2), references and subject
index.

EVALUATION

There are only a few critical points to be mentioned:

In Chapter 1 (p. 11), sequentially ordered vowels and consonants as building
elements of spoken language signs are contrasted with simultaneously ordered
parameters of signed language signs. Taking distinctive features of vowels and
consonants instead would have provided an additional perspective on the
relation of simultaneity vs. sequentiality in both modalities.

In Chapter 7, the advice ''Please read the sentences from the first paragraph
again'' (p. 149) left me in doubt of what could be meant.

Chapter 8: The description of glossing does not refer to the ''Leipzig
Glossing Rules'' 
https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php and the author does
not draw parallels to glossing in spoken language research, which could be
illustrative.

The signed spatial metaphors are not discussed in relation to conceptual
metaphors in general, though sign languages can be an important source for
these.

Regrettably, the author keeps to the old sign linguistic dichotomy of
''frozen''/''established'' vs. ''productive'' lexicon which goes back to the
1990ies (Mary Brennan). This dichotomy is not easily comparable to spoken
language linguistic terminology, where ''productive'' means a rule of language
still in use (i.e. producing new form combinations) and contrasts to
''non-productive'' rules which are no longer used in the community. 

The dichotomy is the result of a problem of lemma representation in
dictionaries, not a problem of sign language analysis: Some types of sign
language verbs (e.g. so-called agreement and movement verbs) show a rich
morphology concerning the participants (using so-called classifiers) and
different parameters of movement. As there is no infinitive in sign languages,
there is no 'natural' neutral or less marked form which could be selected as
the lemma (a similar problem is also existent in spoken languages
dictionaries, e.g. for Arabic or Hungarian where a finite form is selected to
represent the lemma). Instead, one has to choose a ''citation form'', i.e. a
morphologically sufficiently enriched form which is a prototypical realization
of the respective verb. Moreover, as all parameters can change in production,
related to context, there is no element in such verbs which could be called
the stem. Nonetheless, native signers seem to know the respective concepts
(like ''give'' or ''move'') and the morphological rules for the production of 
the verbs in question. Accordingly, sign language dictionaries show
protoypical instances of them. Therefore the given definition is not adequate;
it says that the productive lexicons were ''... an inventory of phonological
building blocks (handshapes, movements,...) from which the language user can
make a selection to form new signs that do not (yet) belong to the frozen
lexicon.'' (p. 173f). This definition assumes that the respective verbs are
''invented'' anew in every signing act and would differ radically from the
elements of the ''frozen'' lexicon. We can conclude that the dichotomy as such
is not adequate even for sign languages as it mixes lexical and morphological
criteria and misinterprets the difficulty of establishing lemmas for the
elements of the ''productive lexicon'' in dictionaries as a property of sign
languages. 

Concerning sign language dictionaries, the author does not refer to general
quality criteria which are not yet fulfilled by many dictionaries - compared
to spoken languages - due to the lack of funding. Instead, she just describes
the actual types of these dictionaries.

In Chapter 14 a discussion of language rights as stated by international
treaties (including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN
Declaration of the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic,
Religious and Linguistic Minorities and the UN Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities) is missing. The same is valid for the documents on
sign language and education, edited by the self-representation bodies of the
Deaf, the World Federation of The Deaf (https://wfdeaf.org) and the European
Union of the Deaf (www.eud.eu/).

In sum, the book offers a clear, well readable presentation, adequately lean
for an introduction (on average, the chapters comprise about 25 pages). This
is also valid for the arguments which are presented e.g. in morphosyntactic
analysis. The presentation is rather neutral with respect to competing
linguistic theories because it concentrates on the language material offered
and on its uncontroversial description. In the interest of a short
presentation, internal controversies of sign language linguistics, e.g. about
the ''classifiers'' or the amount of gestural (i.e. non-linguistic) elements
in sign language texts are only very briefly mentioned, but the recommended
further reading offers rich possibilities to the readers to go on in every
thematic direction.

The method to start with well-known categories from spoken language research
and to look on sign languages from a typological perspective, checking how
these categories appear in sign languages or whether they have functional
equivalents, is illustrative and makes access easy for people coming from an
exclusively spoken language linguistics. This highly recommendable book is
especially important as sign languages are still ignored or dealt with only
very cursorily in many introductions to linguistics.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER






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