Points, Depictions, Gestures and Enactment: Partly Lexical and Non-Lexical Signs as Core Elements of Single Clause-Like Units in Auslan (Australian Sign Language)

* We would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council grant #DP1094572; the members of the deaf community who have contributed to the Auslan Corpus; and the researchers and annotators who have enriched the corpus to its current state (in approximate chronological order, with the most recent first): Christopher Hansford, Donovan Cresdee, Michael Gray, Lindsay Ferrara, Julia Allen, Gerry Shearim, Karin Banna, Louise de Beuzeville, Dani Fried, Della Goswell and Adam Schembri. We are especially grateful to Lindsay Ferrara, Toby Gifford, Peter Petocz and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments that helped to improve this paper. Any errors are our own.

Abstract

Pointing signs, depicting signs and manual gestures are all used for meaningful expression in Auslan, as are full or partial body enactments to demonstrate action or dialogue. This article outlines a corpus-driven approach to identifying clause-like units in a native signed language and investigates the use of pointing signs, depicting signs, gestures and enactments to express core elements of possible clause-like units in Auslan narratives. We explore the frequency and distribution of the core argument and predicate elements of single clause-like units that were identified in elicited retellings of an Aesop's fable which have been archived in the Auslan Corpus. Core elements of these units are described according to sign type, the order in which they appear and handedness (articulation with the strong or weak hand). We find that one-third of the core elements in the single clause-like units in these Auslan narratives are expressed via pointing signs, depicting signs, gestures and enactments, in various orders. This study uses empirical corpus-based data to contribute insights into the use of composite utterances in a signed language and therefore on the way meaning is negotiated between interactants.

Keywords:

• Auslan
• Sign Language
• Corpus Linguistics
• Constructions
• Lexicology
• Clause
• Lexicalization

Notes

* We would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council grant #DP1094572; the members of the deaf community who have contributed to the Auslan Corpus; and the researchers and annotators who have enriched the corpus to its current state (in approximate chronological order, with the most recent first): Christopher Hansford, Donovan Cresdee, Michael Gray, Lindsay Ferrara, Julia Allen, Gerry Shearim, Karin Banna, Louise de Beuzeville, Dani Fried, Della Goswell and Adam Schembri. We are especially grateful to Lindsay Ferrara, Toby Gifford, Peter Petocz and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments that helped to improve this paper. Any errors are our own.

¹ http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

² http://elar.soas.ac.uk/deposit/johnston2012auslan, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

³ For example, see the British Sign Language Corpus project (http://www.bslcorpusproject.org/), Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL), University College London, UK; and Corpus Nederlandse Gebarentaal (http://www.ru.nl/corpusngt/), Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

⁴ See also Mason (2012) for an overview of key historical developments in acknowledging the integrated relationship between sound and movement in choreographed performance traditions.

⁵ See also Nespor and Sandler (1999), Sandler (1999), Brentari and Crossley (2002), Fenlon et al. (2007) and Sze (2008) for discussion of visual prosody in various SLs. However, note that investigations of SL prosody to date have largely focussed on the identification of unit boundaries and possible syntactic functions of specific prosodic features, rather than the identification and description of intonation contours.

⁶ As this investigation is still very exploratory, it was not appropriate to use an inter-rater reliability measure at this stage. The use of such a measure depends upon a notion of established validity, which is not yet available for investigations of SL corpora such as the one undertaken here. However, see Hodge (2014) on the development of a collaborative and iterative method for checking annotated analyses in a SL corpus, and how this method can be used to both quantify rates of disagreement and qualify the analytical preferences of annotators.

⁷ Computed with dispersions2 script (Gries 2008, 2010b) using R 2.14.0 (see R Development Core Team 2012). Script source: http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/research/dispersion/_dispersions2.r

⁸ Computed with the vcd package using R 2.14.0 (see R Development Core Team 2012).