Information Structure in Sign Languages

Evidence from Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands

Vadim Kimmelman

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501516863
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501509933
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This book presents a first comprehensive overview of existing research on information structure in sign languages. Furthermore, it is combined with novel in-depth studies of Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. The book discusses how topic, focus, and contrast are marked in the visual modality and what implications this has for theoretical and typological study of information structure. Such issues as syntactic and prosodic markers of information structure and their interactions, relations between different notions of information structure, and grammaticalization of markers of information structure are highlighted. Empirical studies of the two sign languages also showcase different methodologies that are used in such research and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. The book contains a general introduction to the field of information structure and thus can be used by linguists new to the field.

Part I: Introduction

1Introduction

1.1What is information structure?

When we use language, we usually transfer information. Languages have the tools to encode information (words, morphemes, grammatical patterns), but also to help the addressee to decode the information. Consider the sentence: “Alisa flew to Moscow”. The word Alisa receives stress (signified by bold in the example), and in English stress often indicates that this is the new information that the addressee should attend to. Languages use many and varied means to indicate what is new or old information; word stress is but one example. Information structure is a theory that tries to describe and explain how this information exchange is managed.

Sign languages mark information structure as well. Consider the following example from Russian Sign Language (RSL) (1) (see also the glossing conventions in the beginning of the book, and Section 1.3 for a very brief introduction to special properties of sign languages). Apart from the information itself (a dog scratches the girl, a cat grabs the boy), a lot of extra instructions are present in this utterance. First, leftward and rightward body leans (lbl and rbl above the glosses) accompany the two clauses, which signifies that the two situations are contrasted with each other (see also Figure 1.1). Second, the constituent ix-b boy ix-b ‘the boy’ is marked with raised eyebrows (br), which means approximately that the boy has already been mentioned, but that the previous clause was not about him. Finally, the signs SCRATCH and GRAB are marked by prosody: SCRATCH contains more repetitions than normally, and GRAB is held for a long time, which signifies that these signs represent new and important information.

Figure 1.1: Leftward and rightward body leans from example (1)

Based on my research, and research by other sign language researchers, in this book I describe how information structure works in sign languages, and why this is an interesting question.

There is a plethora of literature on information structure, so it is a futile enterprise to do justice to the current thought in this field within a short introduction (or even within a lengthy book). Therefore, in this section (and then in Chapter 2) I only introduce basic ideas that are relevant to the present study and that are accepted by most people in the field, based on Krifka (2008), Zimmerman & Onea (2011), and various chapters in Féry & Ishihara (2016). A reader interested in information structure as a field can start with Krifka (2008) as a general guideline, and then continue to the chapters in Féry & Ishihara (2016) for a broad overview of the relevant phenomena.

Krifka (2008) argued that a useful notion when speaking about information structure is the notion of Common Ground (Stalnaker 1974). Common Ground is the knowledge shared by the interlocutors. In the course of communication, the Common Ground is constantly changing. For instance, the speaker who utters the sentence (2) tells something new to the addressee, namely, that the monk went to Paris. This new piece of information has then to be included in the Common Ground.

(2)	The monk went to Paris.

According to Krifka, it is necessary to distinguish between Common Ground content, and Common Ground management. In example (2), the proposition “the monk went to Paris” is the content. However, when the speaker utters this sentence, he also instructs the addressee how to interpret it. In this case, for instance, the speaker uses the definite noun phrase the monk, and the fact that this noun phrase is definite is a signal to the addressee that the referent should be familiar, that is, already be a part of the Common Ground. In addition, the main phrase accent falls on Paris, thereby instructing the addressee that this is new information that should be added to the Common Ground. The example thus illustrates that a speaker may employ morphosyntactic (choice of determiner) and prosodic (stress) means.

Information structure is primarily related to Common Ground management.1 It is concerned with the signals that the interlocutors give each other in order to control and manage information flow, such as marking given information for the ease of locating it in the Common Ground and highlighting new and important information as a signal for Common Ground update. These two functions: marking information as belonging to the Common Ground, and marking information as necessary for updating the Common Ground, are tightly connected to the notions of topic and focus, respectively.

The notion of (sentence) topic is easier to understand in terms of a metaphor introduced by Reinhart (1982) and developed in Vallduví (1992). It is useful to picture Common Ground as a file card system. Each proposition is written on a card, and each card has a header which helps identify and locate it. The topic of the sentence would therefore be a constituent that is also the header of a file card in the Common Ground. The rest of the sentence is usually called “the comment”.

Applying this metaphor to example (2), the Common Ground contains a card with a header “the monk” and some information written on it about the monk. When (2) is uttered, the topical constituent of the sentence “the monk” is the signal to the addressee to find this particular card and to add new information, the comment “is in Paris”, to this card.

This metaphor has important consequences. For instance, if topics are used to identify cards with information in the Common Ground, these cards should already be there. Therefore, usually, topics cannot be new information; they have to be given. However, it is also very important to understand that the notion of topic cannot be reduced to the notion of given information. Consider the examples in (3). Both the subject and the object are given information, and both examples express the same proposition (A.O and J.K married). However, the first sentence is telling something about Aristotle Onassis, while the second one conveys information about Jacqueline Kennedy. Based on such examples Reinhart argued that topics are defined by aboutness: a topic is what the sentence is about. This definition has been accepted by many researchers since then, but the definition and the notion itself have also been widely criticized for its vagueness (Büring 2016).

(3)	a.	[Aristotle Onassis]Topic married Jacqueline Kennedy.
	b.	[Jacqueline Kennedy]Topic married Aristotle Onassis.

Another key notion of information structure is focus. Zimmerman & Onea (2011) even argue that it is a universal pragmatic notion, although the realizations are different cross-linguistically. Intuitively, focus is the part of the sentence that is highlighted by the speaker so that the addressee understands that this part contains new and important information that should be added to the Common Ground. Put even more simply, focus can be conceived as the part of a sentence which answers a question – be it an overt or a covert one. For instance, in (4), interlocutor A asks a question “Who went to Paris?”, and the part of B’s sentence which is the direct answer to this question, namely Alisa, is the focus of the sentence.

(4)

A:Who went to Paris?

B: Alisa went to Paris.

Many researchers, including Krifka (2008) and Zimmermann & Onea (2011), have argued that focus should be defined by means of alternatives (Rooth 1992). Krifka (2008: 247) proposed the following definition: “Focus indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions.” If we apply this to (4) above, focus on Alisa indicates that there are alternatives to the proposition expressed in this sentence, namely “John went to Paris”, “Mary went to Paris”, etc. B’s sentence indicates that out of all of these alternatives only one is true, namely, “Alisa went to Paris”. Note also that these alternatives are actually introduced in the context by the question “Who went to Paris?”: asking such a question evokes the alternatives. The fact that the dialogue in (4) is well formed is the result of the match between the alternatives evoked by the question and the alternatives evoked by the focus in the answer.

I will further define and discuss the notions of topic and focus in Chapter 2; here, however, it is necessary to emphasize one very important point. As most researchers in the field of information structure know, there is no consensus on how to define even these most basic notions. According to Féry & Ishihara (2016: 1), “there are countless definitions of basic IS <information structural> notions and related theories that have been proposed in the literature. Many researchers use the same terminology to refer to different notions, or different terms are applied to the same concept.” This creates a very serious complication to developing a general theory of information structure and to conducting typological/comparative research.

Nevertheless, as the multiple chapters in Féry & Ishihara (2016) demonstrate, linguists are doing their best to better understand this complicated field, both by developing elaborate formal analyses of various phenomena, and by comparing diverse languages from all over the world. Sign languages, however, have so far not made a significant contribution to the typological or theoretical studies of information structure.

1.2Sign languages and typology

Sign languages are natural languages existing in the visual-spatial modality. Therefore, any theory attempting a universal account of human linguistic capacity must take sign languages into account. This means that both researchers developing formal theories of grammar, and typologists describing linguistic diversity should include sign languages in their samples. However, at the moment, this hardly ever happens.

Zeshan (2008) described the history of research on differences between sign languages. Sign language linguistics is a very young discipline, starting from the seminal work of Stokoe (1960). This first work, along with a large proportion of all works within sign linguistics, has been devoted to American Sign Language (ASL). Early research on ASL has been followed by research on European sign languages: British Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language, and also on Sign Language of the Netherlands. Subsequently, linguists also became interested in non-European sign languages, and only very recently in village sign languages, which are sign languages used in small isolated communities. The field of sign language typology is thus very young. However, some interesting results have already been achieved. For instance, the papers collected in Zeshan (2006) analyzed negation and questions based on a variety of both Western and non-Western sign languages; the papers in Zeshan and Perniss (2008) analyzed possessive and existential constructions.

For now, it is thus very complicated to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossing conventions
• List of sign languages and their abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Topics
• Part III: Focus
• Part IV: Conclusions
• Appendix 1. Stimuli for the study of focus in RSL and NGT
• Appendix 2. Testing reliability of coding for manual prosodic markers
• References
• Subject Index
• Notes