[Lingtyp] Are there (can there be?) more than two modalities?
David Gil
gil at shh.mpg.de
Sun Jan 30 18:19:11 UTC 2022
Wouldn't the vertical column more appropriately be labelled "Autonomous"
vs. "Derivative", reflecting the fact that derivative modes are
parasitic on autonomous modes, providing alternative representations for
languages whose primary and original modes are the ones in the
autonomous column? (Except that whistled language would belong in the
derivative column.)
David
On 30/01/2022 19:48, Riccardo Giomi wrote:
> 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 <mailto:a.schembri at bham.ac.uk>
>
> Twitter: @AdamCSchembri
>
> /Users/schembra/Desktop/Screenshot 2021-02-07 at
> 14.49.24.pngsignature_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 NúriaAlturo, EvelienKeizer & LlúisPayrató (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 removed by sender.
>
>
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--
David Gil
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Email:gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
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