[Lingtyp] Are there (can there be?) more than two modalities?

[Jess Tauber]

Don't forget drummed language. And one can imagine that if we had better
noses and a bigger palette of odor producing glandular secretions we could
have an olfactory language.

Jess Tauber

On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 10:29 AM Adam Schembri <A.Schembri at bham.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Some of us in sign language linguistics distinguish language, modality,
> and channel. If we see face to face interaction as primary (and writing as
> secondary), then natural languages exist in three modalities.
>
> -Spoken English is a language in the auditory-oral modality.
>
> -British Sign Language (BSL) is a language in the visual-gestural modality.
>
> -Pro-tactile American Sign Language is variety of a language in the
> tactile-gestural modality.
>
> Some deaf people are born with Ushers Syndrome, which means they lose
> their vision over time, and they may shift from one modality to another
> (e.g., from visual-gestural ASL to Pro-tactile ASL) as their primary form
> of face-to-face communication. The Bay Islands community mentioned below is
> a multi-generational community of deaf people with Ushers Syndrome.
>
> Of course, English is often accompanied by head movements (e.g., nodding,
> shaking) and manual co-speech gestures in face-to-face communication, so it
> includes visual-gestural aspects as well. The vocal tract, head, and hands
> are all different channels used in multimodal communication.
>
> BSL is primarily in the visual-gestural modality, but it is also
> multi-channel: using manual signs, head movements, and mouth actions, for
> example. Some bimodal-bilinguals may combine aspects of spoken English and
> BSL together as a form of multimodal communication.
>
>
>
> Adam
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> Adam Schembri (he/him), PhD
>
> Professor of Linguistics
>
> Department of English Language and Linguistics
>
> Frankland Building, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
>
> a.schembri at bham.ac.uk
>
> Twitter: @AdamCSchembri
>
> [image: /Users/schembra/Desktop/Screenshot 2021-02-07 at 14.49.24.png][image:
> signature_2040405135]
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> *From: *Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of "
> francoise.rose at univ-lyon2.fr" <francoise.rose at univ-lyon2.fr>
> *Date: *Friday, 28 January 2022 at 14:26
> *To: *"rgiomi at campus.ul.pt" <rgiomi at campus.ul.pt>, Harald Hammarström <
> harald at bombo.se>
> *Cc: *LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [Lingtyp] Are there (can there be?) more than two
> modalities?
>
>
>
> Dear all,
>
> note that the whistled modality (and also drummed, …) is not of the same
> type, as it is a rendering of the oral language.
>
> Françoise
>
>
>
> *De :* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> *De la part de*
> Riccardo Giomi
> *Envoyé :* vendredi 28 janvier 2022 14:51
> *À :* Harald Hammarström <harald at bombo.se>
> *Cc :* LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Objet :* Re: [Lingtyp] Are there (can there be?) more than two
> modalities?
>
>
>
> Dear Ian, dear all,
>
>
>
> I confess I had never thought about this before, but how about a taxonomy
> of modalities such as the following:
>
>
>
> *↓Sensory channel / Mode→*
>
> *Verbal*
>
> *Graphic*
>
> *Acoustic*
>
> Speaking, Whistling, others?
>
> ―
>
> *Visual*
>
> Signing
>
> Writing, Drawings
>
> *Tactile*
>
> Tactile signing
>
> Braille
>
>
>
> As many of you probably know, there have been various attempts to work out
> a graphic system for the representation of signed languages of the type I
> -- somewhat sloppily -- refer to as 'drawings', but I am not aware of any
> really established convention (probably my ignorance). 'Verbal' is also a
> very tentative, and perhaps inaccurate term, but off the top of my head I
> cannot think of a better definition. Finally, the 'others?' in the
> acoustic/verbal cell refers to Daniel Everett's work on Pirahã, a language
> for which the author has documented three other modes besides speaking and
> whistling (namely yelling, humming and singing), each with its own,
> distinct phonetics.
>
>
>
> Everett, Daniel. 1985. Syllable weight, sloppy phonemes, and channels in
> Pirahã discourse. In Mary Niepokuj, Deborah Feder, Vassiliki Nikiforidou,
> and Mary Van Clay (eds.), *Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of
> the Berkeley Linguistics Society*, 408-416. California: Berkeley
> Linguistics Society.
>
> O'Neill, Gareth. 2014. Humming, whistling, singing, and yelling in
> Pirahã: Context and channels of communication in FDG. In Núria Alturo,
> Evelien Keizer & Llúis Payrató (eds.), *The interaction between context
> and grammar in Functional Discourse Grammar. * Special issue of
> *Pragmatics* 24(2): 349–375.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Riccardo
>
>
>
> Harald Hammarström <harald at bombo.se> escreveu no dia sexta, 28/01/2022
> à(s) 01:54:
>
> Hi Ian! There may be a third modality, tactile, attested on the Bay
>
> Islands off the Honduran coast where a critical mass of deaf-blind
>
> people existed for perhaps three generations. If I understood it correctly,
>
> there's a hereditary disease which causes deafness at birth and (gradually)
>
> blindness later in life. So this group developed their own rural sign
>
> language (Bay Islands Sign Language aka French Harbour Sign Language)
>
> which was continued in a tactile modality for those of age. While there
>
> is little to no documentation on the actual signs in sign or tactile
>
> modality, it seems clear that it is a sign language turned tactile, not
>
> a tactile language developed independently of the other modalities. As such
>
> it is perhaps not very different from most (all?) sign languages which can
>
> be used in a tactile way optionally (e.g., in the dark), without losing too
>
> much efficiency. The only difference is that this was possibly used by
>
> a community (albeit small) as their main and only means of communication,
>
> and as far as I know such a congregation of deaf-blind people is attested
>
> nowhere else, and might never happen again. The little information
>
> available on the tactile language is due to Ali & Braithwaite (2021) but
>
> I understand the genetic background to the disease has been researched
>
> for much longer.
>
>
>
> Of course, I would speculate that if there were a community of humans
>
> who, for some reasons, could not use speech/sign/touch they would develop
>
> a smell language or a taste language (assuming they could physically
>
> produce the required amount of signals at will), so there could be all
>
> five modalities corresponding to our senses.
>
>
>
> all the best, H
>
>
>
> Ali, Kristian & Ben Braithwaite. (2021) Bay Islands Sign Language: A
>
> Sociolinguistic Sketch. In Olivier Le Guen, Josefina Safar & Marie
>
> Coppola (eds.), Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas (Sign Language
>
> Typology [SLT] 9), 435-438. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.
>
>
>
>
>
> Pada tanggal Jum, 28 Jan 2022 pukul 00.15 JOO, Ian [Student] <
> ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk> menulis:
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> about a year ago, there was a discussion on whether writing is a
> linguistic modality of its own right, like spoken or signed modalities.
> Although the majority opinion is that writing is simply a reflection of
> the spoken modality and not a modality by itself, I argued that written
> modality can be independent, based on several factors:
>
>    - The deaf people can learn and write written languages without
>    exposure to its spoken form;
>    - Some parts of the written modality are untranslatable to speech
>    (such as the bullets I am using here);
>    - There are languages that have been used almost exclusively in
>    written form, such as Classical Chinese, which is incomprehensible when
>    read aloud in any spoken language (other than perhaps Old Chinese).
>
> David Gil disagreed and argued that even if deaf person writes a written
> language, they are still in some sense communicating in a spoken language,
> just in its written form.
> For now, let's leave that discussion aside, and say that written modality
> is not an independent modality.
> The question I would like to ask is: Are there any other linguistic
> modalities? Or do we have only two - signed and spoken?
> If we have only two modalities, then is it hypothetically possible to have
> other modalities?
> Or are the two modalities biologically ingrained in our brains, and we can
> only truly acquire a language in either signed or spoken form?
> To me this seems to be a critical question regarding how we understand
> human language, yet to my knowledge, it has been seldom discussed. So I
> would appreciate your opinion on this issue.
>
>
> From Uppsala,
>
> Ian
>
> [image: Image removed by sender.]
>
>
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