Formational and functional characteristics of pointing signs in a corpus of Auslan (Australian sign language): are the data sufficient to posit a grammatical class of ‘pronouns’ in Auslan?
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Trevor Johnston
The author is
Trevor Johnston , Professor of Signed Language Linguistics, Centre for Language Sciences, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is a hearing native signer of Auslan, the natural sign language of the Australian deaf community, having grown up with deaf parents and numerous close deaf relatives across five generations, all of whom used or use Auslan. He has conducted linguistic research into Auslan and signed languages generally for over 30 years having written the first sketch grammar, second language curriculum and dictionary of Auslan (in book, CD-ROM and internet formats). He has advocated and researched bilingual Auslan/English education for deaf children. Most recently he created the first major digital video archive of a signed language which was purpose built to document the language and to create a machine readable linguistic corpus for research. The Auslan corpus is currently the largest of its type in the world and the annotation of the corpus is on-going. His interests are primarily in lexicalization, grammaticalization, the relationship between gesture and language, cognitive and construction grammars, and corpus linguistics.
Abstract
It has been argued that referential pointing signs in signed languages (SLs) are linguistic signs of the grammatical class pronoun rather than pointing gestures. In support of the existence of pronouns in SLs, claims of a categorical nature have been made of the usage and form of pointing signs that are based on very limited datasets. In this paper I present data to show that many of these claims also do not align closely with relevant functional and formational characteristics of pointing signs from a corpus of Australian SL (Auslan) nor, potentially, with data from other SLs; or they appear to be equally true of the deictic (indexical) gestural points made in co-speech gesture by non-signers. I not only concur with ar-guments that these signs are actually blends of linguistic and gestural elements but also argue against analysing SL referen-tial points as members of the grammatical class pronoun.
About the author
The author is Trevor Johnston, Professor of Signed Language Linguistics, Centre for Language Sciences, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is a hearing native signer of Auslan, the natural sign language of the Australian deaf community, having grown up with deaf parents and numerous close deaf relatives across five generations, all of whom used or use Auslan. He has conducted linguistic research into Auslan and signed languages generally for over 30 years having written the first sketch grammar, second language curriculum and dictionary of Auslan (in book, CD-ROM and internet formats). He has advocated and researched bilingual Auslan/English education for deaf children. Most recently he created the first major digital video archive of a signed language which was purpose built to document the language and to create a machine readable linguistic corpus for research. The Auslan corpus is currently the largest of its type in the world and the annotation of the corpus is on-going. His interests are primarily in lexicalization, grammaticalization, the relationship between gesture and language, cognitive and construction grammars, and corpus linguistics.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Formulaicity in an agglutinating language: the case of Turkish
- A contrastive corpus-based analysis of the frequency of discourse markers in NE and NNE media discourse: Implications for a “universal discourse competence”
- Noun-Noun sequences and the complement-modifier distinction: a corpus-based study
- Formational and functional characteristics of pointing signs in a corpus of Auslan (Australian sign language): are the data sufficient to posit a grammatical class of ‘pronouns’ in Auslan?
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