Discourse Referents in Space - Anaphora Resolution in German Sign Language

太空中的话语演讲者——德国手语中的照应解析

• 批准号: 255017576
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Markus Steinbach
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Georg-Elias-Müller-Institut für Psychologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2013-12-31 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/255017576?language=en
• 关键词: Discourse; Referents; Space; Anaphora; Resolution

Natural languages come in two modalities, the oral-auditory modality of spoken languages and the visual-gestural modality of sign languages. Although the two modalities clearly differ in the production and perception of communicative signals, the underlying linguistic structures and cognitive processes seem to be very similar across both modalities. Nevertheless, sign languages retain some modality-specific properties that may impact the linguistic and cognitive processes underlying the perception and production of signed communication. In this project, we focus on a characteristic of sign languages which is directly linked to the modality-specific realization of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic categories in the three-dimensional signing space: Sign languages actively use the geometrical properties of the signing space to establish discourse referents and disambiguate anaphoric relationships in a way which is alien to oral-auditory languages. The objective of the proposed research project is a theory of the linguistic structure and cognitive processing of anaphoric relations and discourse referents in sign language that is based on empirical and experimental data. On the one hand, this will contribute to the understanding of an under-studied language in the visual-gestural modality. On the other hand, it will also broaden our knowledge of the human language faculty in general and will provide new insights into the influence of modality on linguistic structure.

自然语言有两种形式，口语的口头-听觉形式和手语的视觉-手势形式。虽然这两种模式在交际信号的产生和感知方面存在明显差异，但两种模式的潜在语言结构和认知过程似乎非常相似。然而，手语保留了一些特定的模态特性，这些特性可能会影响感知和产生手语交流的语言和认知过程。在这个项目中，我们专注于手语的一个特点，这是直接联系到特定的模态实现的形态句法，语义和语用类别的三维签名空间：手语积极使用的几何属性的签名空间，建立话语所指和消歧照应关系的方式是陌生的口头听觉语言。拟议的研究项目的目标是一个理论的语言结构和认知处理的照应关系和话语所指的手语是基于经验和实验数据。一方面，这将有助于理解一个欠研究的语言中的视觉-手势模态。另一方面，它也将拓宽我们对人类语言能力的认识，并将为情态对语言结构的影响提供新的见解。