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

Sun Jan 30 17:48:29 UTC 2022

Right, drummed languages! I had completely forgotten about those..

Come to think of it, I think drummed languages fit quite well, logically,
in the top-right corner of the tentative taxonomy I came up with in my
earlier message. But then of course it is no longer accurate to speak of a
'graphic' linguistic mode. Perhaps a more useful term for the mode
opposition, rather than "verbal / graphic", could be "unsupported /
supported" -- meaning (not) using a concrete, tangible support besides the
human body itself. So, reformulating the taxonomy (for what it's worth) and
of course with no prejudice to multi-channel communication, we would have

*↓Sensory channel / Mode→*

*Unsopported*

*Supported*

*Acoustic*

Speaking, Whistling, others?

Drumming

*Visual*

Signing

Writing, Sign writing

*Tactile*

Pro-tactile signing

Braille

I am not sure how useful this can be, and as I mentioned earlier, this is
not really a taxonomy of modalities as such.. But, to me, it is always kind
of fun to try and decompose things into features :)

Best wishes,
R

Jess Tauber <tetrahedralpt at gmail.com> escreveu no dia sexta, 28/01/2022
à(s) 18:12:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *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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