A broadly usage-based account of British Sign Language syntax

关于人类语言的最重要和最有影响力的研究传统上只集中在口语上。手语，由手和身体(而不是言语器官)产生，由眼睛(而不是耳朵)感知，是一个独特的重要测试案例，用来测试人类语言的工作方式，以及当今世界多样化的人类语言是否共享一些普遍的结构组织模式。拟议的项目将对手语的语法系统进行首次大规模、详细的调查，结合使用来自实验数据和自发对话数据的聚合证据，以及基于语料库的、认知/功能和社会语言学的方法。基于语料库的语言研究是那些依赖于大量的、具有代表性的、计算机化的语言记录集合的研究(如英国国家英语语料库)。认知/功能语法理论认为，我们对语言的知识源于我们使用语言的多种方式，而不是来自于我们大脑中固有的一些语法。社会语言学是研究社会因素，如一个人的性别或年龄，是如何参与语言变异和变化的。语言学领域越来越多的人认识到，这三个研究领域有相当大的重叠--都依赖于语言的使用。这种广泛的基于用法的研究语法结构的方法构成了目前最先进的语言理论和口语描述，并将首次应用于手语，使用最近收集的英国手语语料库(BSL)的证据。收集的其他数据将包括产出性(即对卡通等刺激的手语反应)和判断数据(即询问第二语言手语手语者对各种语法结构的可接受性的直觉)。总体而言，该项目利用新的方法和技术，采用多学科的方法研究基于用法的语言学和相关学科中的手语语法。由于对手语是如何构成和使用的知之甚少，这个项目将使我们能够研究BSL语法中什么是可能的和不可能的(这是通过从以前的研究中引出的更大规模的产生和判断数据得出的)，以及重要的是，BSL中什么是可能的和不可能的(通过自发的语料库数据直接显示)。使用这两种类型的数据，使用广泛的基于用法的方法，是发现关于(手语)语言结构和用法的事实的最佳方式。这将使研究人员能够对手语和口语进行适当的比较，从而了解语言多样性和语言共性，这是语言学和认知科学中的一个关键领域。

The most important and influential research on human language has traditionally focused only on spoken languages. Sign languages, produced by the hands and body (rather than the speech organs) and perceived by the eyes (not ears) are a unique and therefore important test case for ideas about the way that human languages work, and whether the diverse set of human languages in the world today do or do not share some universal patterns of structural organisation.The proposed project will conduct the first ever large-scale, detailed investigation of the grammatical system of a sign language, combining the use of converging evidence from both experimental data and spontaneous conversation data with corpus-based, cognitive/functional and sociolinguistic approaches. Corpus-based studies of language are those that rely on large, representative, computerised collections of language recordings (such as the British National Corpus of English). Cognitive/functional theories of grammar assume that our knowledge of language arises out of the many ways we use it, rather than from some innate grammar hard-wired into our brain. Sociolinguistics is the study of how social factors, such as a person's gender or age, are involved in language variation and change. There is growing recognition in the field of linguistics that there is considerable overlap across these three areas of study - all relying on language use. This broadly usage-based approach to studying grammatical structure constitutes the current state-of-the-art in linguistic theory and description for spoken languages and will be applied here to a sign language for the first time, using evidence from a recently collected corpus of British Sign Language (BSL). Other data collected will include both production (i.e. signed responses to stimuli such as cartoons) and judgement data (i.e. asking BSL signers for their intuitions about the acceptability of various grammatical structures). Overall, this project takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of sign language grammar across usage-based linguistics and related disciplines, taking advantage of new methods and technologies. Since little is known about how sign languages are structured and used, this project will enable us to study what is possible and impossible in BSL grammar (which is suggested via elicited production and judgement data, on a much larger scale from previous research) and importantly, what is probable and improbable in BSL (which is directly shown via spontaneous corpus data). The use of both types of data, using a broad range of usage-based approaches, is the best way to discover facts about (sign) language structure and use. This will put researchers in a position to make appropriate comparisons between signed and spoken languages, and thus understand language diversity and linguistic universals, a key area of interest within linguistics and cognitive science more generally.