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Contrast and Prominence in South American phonologies - Lectures 3-4: Contrast and Dispersion in Handshapes in a Village Sign Language| old_uid | 19446 |
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| title | Contrast and Prominence in South American phonologies - Lectures 3-4: Contrast and Dispersion in Handshapes in a Village Sign Language |
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| start_date | 2021/10/01 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle Rousselot |
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| details | This seminar series offers a set of empirically novel data that can lead to revisions and refinements of our models of the phonetics-phonology interface. Specifically, they demonstrate that the overall phonological structure of a given language system can influence that extent to which particular phonetic cues are recruited to enhance perception, and that contrarily, the perceptual robustness of particular cues can influence the shape of phonological distributions. Data from the Maxakal´ı spoken language and from a village signed lan- guage within its community will form the core of two blocks of lectures, both of which are intimately related to the diverse ways that the same elements may serve distinct roles of dispersion and contrast, depending on the nature of the underlying system. |
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| summary | We provide an analysis of the distribution of handshapes on the dominant and non-dominant hand in the incipient village sign language found in the Maxakal´ı community in Brazil. The most frequent handshapes reflect tendencies in choosing from the crosslinguistically unmarked set of handshapes, and are particularly well-suited to quantitative analyses of handshape complexity found in models such as Ann (2006) and Brentari (2003), in addition to favouring a core set chosen from the most maximally dispersed handshapes. This in fact suggests that emergent sign languages, no matter how young, show quantitative correlations between token frequency and articulatory complexity, despite tendencies that they may have otherwise to be iconically referential. We demonstrate that these trends hold for the non-dominant hand as well, an element of sign language phonologies with no analogue in the spoken domain. Finally, we demonstrate how allophonic thumb extension can be understood as contrast enhancement in signed languages, leading to a visual analogue of acoustic prominence. |
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| responsibles | Isel |
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