Cross-modal perspectives on grammaticalization: Aspect markers in creoles and sign languages

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Our research compares two often overlooked types of languages: creoles, and sign languages. These languages work in different ways (they use different modalities) so we say that our research is 'cross-modal'.Creoles are a type of spoken language that emerged in the context of European colonial expansion, where the language varieties of small but dominant groups of traders or colonists were acquired and restructured to differing degrees by a large number of dominated people.Sign languages are not spoken languages at all, but are produced using the hands and other elements such as facial expressions and head movements. Most sign languages emerged naturally where a critical number of deaf people have had regular contact. Researchers have often noted similarities between creoles and sign languages in their social settings, for example in terms of how they emerge, how they are passed on to new generations of users. In the past, creoles and sign languages have also been stigmatised, and thought of as 'lesser' than languages such as English and German.Intriguing similarities have been noted, too, in how the grammars of these languages have developed. In particular, it is claimed that creole and sign language grammars have changed quickly - but that they do not have some of the more 'mature' features that other languages have (such as affixes and fixed positions for certain function words). However, these observed similarities have never been examined in a way that takes into account large numbers of languages.In the CrossMoGram Project, we compare creoles and sign languages systematically in a particular area of grammar: aspect. Aspect is to do with how events are presented (as a simple example, consider the differences in the way the English verbs 'eat' and 'arrive' appear in the following sentence 'I was eating when my friend arrived').We look to see how similar creoles and sign languages really are in how they use aspect - are they more similar to each other than to other spoken languages, for example, and is it true that creoles and sign languages don't have the more 'developed' features that other languages have? And when the parts of language that show aspect change, do they change in similar ways for creoles and for sign languages?To do this, we review large amounts of research on aspect in creoles, including sources that show us how words have changed over time. There is much less research on sign languages (which, in any case, cannot be written down) so we use a different method here: we look at seven corpora (collections of sign language data) to see how signers express aspect in those sign languages.As well as academic publications, we disseminate our findings in the form of a database of languages that can be used and added to by other researchers, and for other areas of grammar as well as aspect. We make this database as easy-to-use as possible, and link it to other language resources.The project is led by an unusual pairing of researchers - a specialist on creoles and language diversity, who is hearing; and a deaf researcher with experience of sign language research. Our backgrounds mean that we can work in parallel. We also take the time to look at each other's data, so that we learn more about our own language specialisms.Sign language users and creole speakers have both faced oppression in the past because of misunderstandings about their languages, and to share our findings, we bring together some of the people we have worked with before - speakers of Seychelles Creole and deaf Indonesian Sign Language users - for an online event. We invite them to share their experiences of language, and from this, we produce a 5-minute video that raises awareness about sign languages and creoles. This enables us to explain our findings in an easy-to-understand way, and gives signers and creole speakers the chance to correct some misconceptions that people have about their languages.