Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sign language spatial modulation across sociohiohistorical contexts

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Sign languages (SLs) are situated in the visual-spatial modality, and the body and hands are directly visible during communication. This affords SLs the use of three-dimensional space in fundamental ways. Space is used, or modulated, to refer to locations in an iconic way, allowing signers to place or move referents based on their real world locations or relative spatial configurations. Space is also modulated to track grammatical arguments—i.e., to introduce and maintain discourse referents. How signers weave both person and location referents throughout a discourse has been of great theoretical interest in the sign language linguistics literature. Among proposed frameworks, some reconcile these two uses of space within a single linguistic agreement analysis, while others employ both linguistic (morphemic) and non-linguistic (gestural) analyses rather than an entirely linguistic one.In order to better understand the origins and development of these two referent functions in differing linguistic environments, this research analyzes the distribution of spatial modulations (locative and argument) across three languages–American Sign Language (ASL) a well-established sign language over 300 years old, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) young sign language of approximately 50 years old that is developing autonomously without outside influence, and Lengua de Señas Costarricense (LESCO) a young sign language that is developing in a situation with strong language contact with ASL. The student researcher will obtain language samples from three sub-groups of NSL and LESCO that represent earlier stages of grammatical development, using the “apparent time” hypothesis, and compare them with equivalent samples from the well-established sign language, ASL. The goal of this work is to tease apart the factors involved in deictic reference tracking in spatial events from its use in argument structure. The proposed research will also serve to further document under-studied sign languages, and to archive the data collected in a permanent, institutionally-maintained repository.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.