A broadly usage-based account of British Sign Language syntax

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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.