Sign Language Negation: Typology and Grammaticalization

[00:00:35]welcome everyone my name is andres javier i am a professor at the federal university of paloma sorry i'll start again um welcome everyone my name is andres javier i am a professor at the federal um i think someone has the youtube yeah i'm really sorry okay now i will start so welcome again everyone my name is andres javier i am a professor at the federal university of parana where i teach libras brazilian sign language linguistics and the linguist in the libras teacher training course latvias today i have the great pleasure and honor of moderating this fantastic session of the series abralinovich linguistis online in which professor roland fall from the university of amsterdam is going to deliver a talk entitled sign language negation typology and grammaticalization before introducing professor paul on behalf of abraling i would like to read a few words the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped many of our academic practices at this time social distance is still an important and necessary measure however the exchange of ideas within the linguistic community has to be maintained with this in mind the brazilian linguistic association aberlin in cooperation with committee national permanent languages association society of america linguistics uh association of great britain societa's linguistic european australian linguistic linguistic society british association for applied linguistics and associated linguistics organized the virtual event abralinovivo linguistis online the event had a daily schedule of lectures and panel sessions with distinguished languages from all over the world and from all sub-disciplines due to its huge success the event became a regular series the purpose of the series abram neoviable languages online is to give students and researchers free access to state-of-the-art discussions on the most diverse topics related to the study of human language all activities are broadcast online here an open and interactive platform the broadcasters are freely available for later access as well as i said before today's talks is entitled sign language negation typology and grammaticalization and is going to be delivered by professor roland fall who is an associate professor in sign language linguistics at the department of general linguistics in the university of amsterdam he has also been the co-editor of sign language and linguistics since 2007 professor pfau is the author of several articles books book chapters and one of the editors of the very prestigious handbook sign language and international handbook his internationally very influential research has covered several aspects of sign language structure including including pluralization agreement classifiers reciprocals relative clauses questions and negation we brazilians have had the privilege of having professor fought with us here in brazil several times mainly at unesco inaudible participating in conferences seminars and workshops which were attended by a significant number of deaf students and researchers for me again it's a great pleasure and honor to be today's talks moderator um thank you very much abraham for this opportunity and thank you very much roland for being with us again before handing it over to professor fall i'd like to remind the audience that you can send us your questions by the chat so i can ask them to professor follow after his presentation professor fall the screen is yours okay now this uh this already worked that's comfort uh comforting thanks a lot andre for the introduction and uh thanks to abralen for inviting me to participate in this prestigious series indeed i will be talking about sign language negation let me just try to get my screen on the screen yes here we go though this worked so um yeah i will be talking about sign language negation which is a topic that has kept me busy for yeah yes 20 years almost and there are still a lot of things to discover i think it is safe to say that the expression of negation is actually a domain of grammar that has been investigated comparably well for sign languages and this includes sign languages from all over the world urban and rural sign languages and what these studies show over and over again is that all these sign languages employ manual markers of negation but also non-manual markers so this is an interesting uh similarity across sign languages but what is more interesting i think is that we also find typological variation across sign languages but also between sign language and spoken languages and then on top of this there are also interesting similarities between sign languages and spoken languages my aim in this talk is well on the one hand for those of you who know little about sign language negation to provide a rather comprehensive picture of how negation is realized in visual spatial languages and for those of you who already know about sign language linguistics my hope is that i can offer some new details uh on the topic from recent studies you can see on the screen the sun is coming out here in amsterdam so i hope it's not disturbing i want to start with two examples the first one is from the corpus of sign language of the netherlands you will see the video clip twice in sequence maybe one more time what the signer is saying here is that handicapped people are not recognized there here's another example designer from turkish sign language articulates i don't speak or i don't know how to speak one more time so i think you can notice that these two examples are different right i mean not just with regard to the content of course but the markers of negation are different so if you don't know sign language maybe you didn't spot it but here on the screen i show you the manual markers of negation you see it's different hand shapes there were also different movements and maybe you also noticed that there were non-manual markers there were head movements involved in both examples in the first one from sign language of the netherlands ngt we observe a head shake and this headshake accompanied the entire utterance in the second example from turkish sign language we observe a backward head tilt and this is actually visible here on the screen and this backward head tilt only accompanies the final sign in the utterance so this is to give you an idea but of course we will provide much more detail in the following here are some questions that i find interesting the first of all what i would like to know or what i have already investigated is the extent of variation that exists across sign languages in this grammatical domain so what is the extent of variation a second question that i find interesting is what does the variation tell us about grammaticalization and here i particularly refer to grammaticalization of gestures and a third question however one that i will not address today is well how can the variation that we observe be accounted for informal models of grammar yeah but i will not talk about this i have one slide about it um but we will focus on the first two questions let me see whether i can move myself a little bit such that the light is not yeah maybe this is better so here's how i'm going to proceed first of all i will talk about typology and here the focus will be on two broad systems or types of systems of negation in the second part i will dig deeper and i will argue that this two-way classification is not sufficient in part three i will then present a number of further negation strategies once again you will notice that there is uh a piece of information between brackets here so let's see how we are doing time wise when i get to point 3.3 i hope to have enough time to talk also a little bit about language change in the sense of what is called the jazz person cycle before concluding so let's start with our journey into the typology of distinction that i already mentioned briefly goes back to research by zeshan and in a typological study on i think 34 or 36 sign languages she finds a crucial distinction between two types on the one hand we have what she calls manual dominant sign languages now in these sign languages in order to negate a clause you always need to have a manual negative sign still there's also a non-manual negative marker however this marker usually only accompanies the negative sign on the other hand in non-manual dominant sign languages the use of a manual negative sign is optional this means that in such sign languages it is actually common to only use a non-manual marker to negate a clause and most of the time this non-manual marker is a headshake moreover in these sign languages the non-manual let's say the headshake is capable of spreading so it need not only accompany a single sign but it can accompany a part of the clause before i show you a couple of examples um maybe of just a few words about the notation of examples uh which may not be familiar to everyone so what is commonly done in sign language research is that examples are glossed in small caps so every word in small caps represents one sign the sign that is classed as index or sometimes just i x this means that it's a pointing sign usually with the index finger extended subscript numbers which you can also see in the example on the slide refer to points in the signing space this these points will not be relevant for today's talk so i'm not going to say more about it just that you know what will be important in the following is the line above the gloss because this line indicates the presence of a non-manual marker and the length of the line tells you the scope it tells you where the non-manual marker starts and where it ends and most of the time this will be a head shake which sometimes is glossed as neg now this being said let us look at a couple of examples i have glossed examples but i will also provide videos so first the manual dominant sign languages there are two examples here the first one is from russian sign language the second one from inuit sign language which is used in northern canada the negative mental elements are in red so you can see in 1a and 2a that this element appears at the end of the clause you can also see the non-manual markers but what is important is that the examples in b 1b and 2b these examples are ungrammatical this is indicated by the little star preceding the examples these examples do not contain a manual negative sign and therefore they are ungrammatical and this indicates that we are in fact dealing with manual dominant sign languages now here are two examples um this one is from inuit sign language and it is captioned so you will see the signs that he is using the meaning is provided on the slide so the inuit people they don't fish with lines sorry they fish with lines not with rods and the sign for the inuit which you will see looks like this so here we go so the final element in the clause i'm sure you could see it is the negative manual sign here's another example from turkish sign language it's different from the one we have seen before because here the signer uses a headshake and a different manual negative sign as you will see in a moment yeah so you probably noticed that the manual negative sign in these two sign languages is quite similar yeah it has this open hand and like this shaky sideward movement now turning to non-manual dominant sign languages again i provide two examples on the slide these are american sign language and sign language of the netherlands the a examples contain a manual negative sign again in red but the b examples do not but now in crucial contrast to what we said before the b examples are grammatical so in these sign languages it is possible and actually common to negate a clause by means of only a headshake the last example on this slide i will now present as a video and you will see uh the the miner on the right assigning let me wait one more time bye so once again there's no man okay now go one step further if things two within the groups there are different can you hear me okay let me try to to share my screen again i don't know what happened i was kicked out okay let me try one more time you can hear me and you can see the screen okay so let me pick up where i was kicked out i said that we have now seen that there are two types of sys systems now i want to go one step further and i want to show that also within the systems we find differences within the non-manual dominant group we find differences in spreading patterns and with spreading patterns i mean spreading of the headshake so here are examples from three sign languages american sign language catalan sign language and german sign language these are all non-manual dominant sign languages and you can see that in asl and catalan sign language example a and b it is okay it is grammatical to have the head shake only on the manual negative sign when it is present but in german sign language the same is impossible so example c is ungrammatical this is interesting because the word order is the same as in catalan sign language still the b example is grammatical but the c example from german sign language is not now we look at the examples without the manual negative sign which of course is possible in all three sign languages and now we see that catalan sign language patterns with german sign language so in example b and c the headshake accompanies only the verb and these examples are grammatical in the a example from american sign language the same is ungrammatical because in american sign language in this particular case the head shake would have to spread over the entire work phrase so it need also accompany the object which is not the case in catalan sign language in german sign language yeah once again three non-manual dominant sign languages but the patterns with respect to spreading of the headshake may differ between sign languages and now i will zoom in on sign language of the netherlands ngt this is a corpus based study that i've done with my colleague marlus omen a couple of years ago and we analyzed 90 minutes of data from the corpus ngt there were 22 signers involved and we were focusing on clausal negation so we did not consider examples with negative words like nothing and we also did not look at negative modals we found in the data 120 examples and 60 of them did not include a manual negative sign so they were negated only by headshake and actually we have already seen one of these examples we also looked at the constituent order and here we found something interesting so i will not talk about the position of object and work in this presentation but what is interesting is the negative manual sign commonly appears at the end of the clause but it may also precede the work phrase so there appear to be two positions for the manual negative sign where one is more common than the other but both are possible so we have one position after the work phrase and one position preceding the word phrase we also looked at the clauses without not but here the focus was then on word order yeah once again you see that two word orders sov and svo are tested here are a couple of examples i will probably not take you through all of them the uh the interesting one is example number d where you can see that this is one of the examples where negation precedes the verb phrase in a and c the manual negative sign appears clause finally and in b it also follows the word phrase but there is an indexical sign a pointing sign following we also looked at the scope of the headshake so the onset and offset yeah i'm i will not take you through this table because the findings are summarized on the following slide so here's what we found with respect to the headshake all clauses were accompanied by a headshake when the sign not the manual negative sign was present it was also always accompanied by a headshake but in most of the cases 94 the work also was accompanied by it by a headshake elements that follow the work such as the pronoun copies or also the palm up sign they are also accompanied or commonly accompanied by by headshake and one interesting finding concerns subjects because with very few exceptions subjects were not accompanied by a headshake except if they are pronouns so the example that you see on the slide is an exception because here speech therapy is the subject there were very few such cases so to sum up the study on sign language of the netherlands confirms well first of all that ngt is non-manual dominant this was not unexpected it also shows us that ngt allows for two word orders sov and svo but still we do see that the manual negative sign is rather commonly used forty percent what we found particularly interesting is the variation with respect to the position of the manual negative sign something which has also been described for other sign languages mentioned here on the slide it's important to add by the way that this difference in position does not go hand in hand with the difference in meaning so this is basically all that i wanted to say about this basic uh dichotomy yeah the two broad types what we have seen is that the headshake yeah an element that we also commonly find uh used by speakers yeah as a co-speech gesture the headshake can you hear me oh yeah okay here we go i was afraid that again something had went wrong thanks so uh so the headshake yeah which is commonly used as a co-speech gesture is obviously in sign languages subject to language specific constraints the way it is used and the way it is moreover the data suggests that the headshake is tightly linked to the syntactic structure of the utterance and therefore we assume that in these sign languages the headshake is indeed a grammaticalized gesture it's not just a co-speech gesture anymore but it turned into a grammatical marker of negation now the distribution of negative signs as i mentioned previously has also been investigated from a formal perspective i already told you that i will not talk about this but here you see that a fair number of sign languages has been investigated uh from uh yeah formal perspective now this was part one now we're going a step further right so i've shown you that there is a two-way classification of negation systems but the question is now whether this distinction is actually exhaustive let me remind you so far we have been talking about two parameters that characterize these systems on the one hand there is the obligatory presence of neck yeah and with neck i mean the manual negative element on the other hand there is optional spreading of the non-manual whether the headshake for instance can spread and for each of these parameters we can have a plus or a minus so if the negator the manual negative sign is obligatory we get a plus and spreading is not possible minus then we get a manual dominant sign language like for instance italian sign language or turkish sign language the other option is the reverse yeah and these are non-manual dominant sign languages like german sign language so here the manual negative element is not obligatory but spreading of the headshake is possible so these are the two types of systems that we talked about so far but of course if there are two parameters and each one can be plus or minus then we expect four systems right so in principle we would expect a system where the manual negative sign is obligatory but still the non-manual can spread and the reverse and these two systems yeah which are not usually or not commonly talked about are what i want to address next here's an example from russian sign language so this is a recent publication by colleagues from russia and they establish that russian sign language is manual dominant so you see in example b there is a manual negative sign and this is obligatory but still they also observe that the headshake may spread sometimes on the verb as in example b but it may also spread further now this is interesting because this would suggest that this is like the third type in the scheme plus plus what is also really interesting from a typological perspective and maybe you already noticed in russian sign language the word order changes so a is the affirmative clause which is svo but in the negative counterpart there's a strong tendency for the word order to change to sov then let us look again at turkish sign language so previously i argued that turkish sign language is manual dominant the head movements that we looked at this was the headshake and the backward head tilt they do not usually spread but goodgus in a study from a couple of years ago he argues that the relevant grammatical marker is not the head movement so the head movement is a lexical marker that is specified for the manual negative sign but in addition he argues there's also a grammatical marker and this is what he calls non-neutral brow position and you can see what the interpreter did so the brow position may be up or down yeah but it's non-neutral and crucially this marker may spread here's an example from his paper and i think it's quite clear the head movement the backward head tilt accompanies only the final sign but the brow position accompanies the whole clause and if this is true then turkish sign language is also of a different type it would also be type 3 in the previous classification because the not the manual sign is obligatory but the relevant non-manual marker may spread then there is another recent study on on polish sign language and this is a really impressive study because the author analyzed 120 hours which is 80 times as much as what we analyzed for sign language of the netherlands and she reports some really interesting findings so first of all she finds that the headshake is common but not all negative clauses are accompanied by headshake but on the other hand she also finds that there are examples in which negation is only expressed by a headshake it may not be as common in as in sign language of the netherlands but it is possible and this would suggest that polish sign language is non-manual dominant but still she also observes that the headshake almost never spreads beyond a single [Music] sign and now you probably already see how this adds to the typology yeah there may be no straightforward classification for polish sign language but it seems that it comes closest to what we could call the fourth type so it's non-manual dominant so the manual negative sign is optional but the non-manual marker cannot spread yeah so i think this clearly shows that there is more variation and that's probably more types than we initially thought initially we talked about two different types but now we see that maybe all four logical possibilities are indeed attested and i want to add one more piece to the puzzle and this comes from a recent study on australian sign language once again it's a corpus study and once again the author considers a fair amount of data 25 hours and what he finds is again different first of all the negative clauses he identified they almost always contain a manual negative sign there were very few exceptions so this would suggest that australian sign language is manual dominant on top of this headshake was not exactly common it was only observed in just half of the clauses and also in contrast to what we reported before the exact position and also the spreading behavior they appeared not to be linguistically constrained so what he concludes is that actually in australian sign language the headshake is not yet grammaticalized so in a sense the headshake in this sign language is more similar to the co-speech gesture that is also commonly used in english for instance so once again this would add to our understanding of the type topology of these systems right so in a fully fledged natural sign language like australian sign language it need not be the case that the same non-manual marker is grammaticalized to the same extent as in other sign languages so here i will leave this aspect of the typology of negation systems right so we started from two types of systems and then we expanded the typology what i want to do in part three again based on a number of recent studies is to add other types of negation strategies to the picture now let me remind you of an example from german sign language that i showed earlier i showed you an example which suggests that in german sign language when the manual negative sign is present the headshake cannot accompany only the manual negative sign so the example and i've shown it before on the slide is ungrammatical the point being that in german sign language the headshake always has to accompany the verb but now look at this example so you can see the order of signs is the same it's grammatical because the first part of the clause is phrased as a question so the r e means raised eyebrows so the meaning would still be my mother didn't buy a flower but the structure that is used is different so basically the signer is asking a question and then provides the negative answer to the question and this is something that in the literature has been referred to as question answer clauses but it's clearly a different structure right so the first example and the second example on the slide they clearly have different structures so why do i show this example to you i show this example because it has recently been argued for south african sign language that this strategy for negation is very common in this sign language the study is based on semi-spontaneous data and elicited data a total of 135 examples and the author based on the examples but also based on previous literature uh classifies south african sign language as non-manual dominant okay now this is interesting but what is more striking is that 52 of the clauses of the negative clauses were actually realized in the way that i've just shown you they were realized as polar question answer clauses and she also observes that the answer part yeah so the negation may either consist of only a head shake or it may be a manual negator and a headshake here's one example the signer expresses she doesn't smoke i think you could clearly see how in the first part of the utterance the eyebrows go up and i think the head tilts a little bit forward which is typical for a yes no question and then it's followed by the negative answer one more time so yet another strategy to express negation and another aspect that i want to talk about for a couple of minutes is negative concord now negative concord means that a clause contains two or more negative elements but the meaning remains negative usually you would expect that two negative elements they sort of cancel each other out but in negative concord this is not the case there are different types of negative concord what i present here is slightly simplified but we know of course that there are languages where negative concord is the standard negation strategy so in order to express standard negation you use two elements and this is the case in french in other languages negative concord is not used for standard negation but it is obligatory in certain contexts and this is the case for italian and then there are languages like georgian where negative concord is just optional right so you have a choice sometimes you use two negative elements and sometimes you don't but importantly the clause always remains negative now we have already seen for non-manual dominant sign languages that there is negative concord as the standard strategy so in a sign language like sign language of the netherlands or german sign language if we assume that the manual negative sign and the headshake are independent negative elements then the combination of the two is an instance of negative concord now things are different in manual dominant sign languages because here the headshake is not an independent marker of negation this we have already seen and the assumption is often that the headshake is actually a lexical component of the manual negative sign now on the next couple of slides we focus on the type of negative concord where two manual negative elements are combined and this has been observed in manual dominant sign languages and also some non-manual dominant sign languages but it has also been claimed to be ungrammatical in some sign languages and the examples i give on the slide are german sign lang language and italian sign language so once again we find typological differences this time within both groups so here are three examples that illustrate what i call optional negative concord let me just pick one example all three show pretty much the same thing so in georgian sign language the example in b it is it is possible to negate the clause by only a single manual negative sign so the clause final negative particle which is glossed as neck one could be dropped however it is not uncommon to use it in this uh in this context a special case of negative concord is what people have called neck doubling this is also negative concord but now the two negative markers are identical they are the same and this type actually has also been observed in libras the other examples on the slide are from american sign language and sign language of the netherlands and here it has been argued that actually this kind of doubling may contribute to the meaning in that it is emphatic then there is a recent work on russian sign language again and this is really interesting because this was one of the first studies if not the first that demonstrates that the negative concord involving two manual signs is obligatory in certain contexts though in this sign language negative indefinites like nobody or nothing they must be accompanied by another manual negative element so it's not optional it's obligatory and in this way the pattern is reminiscent of what has been described for spoken italian where negative concord is not obligatory in all contexts but in certain contexts it is and the same is true for russian sign language and then one more example uh which i think is also really intriguing from a typological perspective so we have already shown that negative concord in georgian sign language is possible but it's not obligatory but there is one exception in the past tense negative modals like one not or cannot must combine with the basic clause negator this is example a and b so from the adverbial yesterday it's clear that this is past tense and in this case as you can see in example c leaving out the negative particle makes the example ungrammatical but only in the past tense here's one example the word order is slightly different but she says she signs yesterday i could not go there yesterday can not not their goal so this is really intriguing right because in non-past contexts it is actually not possible to combine these negative modals with the basic clause negator so the two examples on this slide are ungrammatical so what we are dealing with is a type of tense specific negative concord this exists in spoken languages yeah typological studies have shown that sometimes negative concord is only observed in one or the other tense but it never applies to only a subset of verbs and this is what makes georgian sign language in this respect really interesting really unusual and here's the last piece that i want to add yeah again we're talking about further negation strategies and now i want to briefly address a specific yeah call it semantic phenomenon and this is called neck raising neck raising means that a negation in the main clause can actually be interpreted in an embedded clause so if you look at example one from english if i say in english i don't think that he likes this movie i actually don't say that i'm not thinking right because i do think something but what i think is that he does not like the movie so the negation in the main clause is actually interpreted in the embedded in the embedded clause this phenomenon has been described for many spoken languages and it has been observed that neck raising only holds for certain predicates and these are cognitive predicates like think or believe because in example 2 also from english it does not work now the predicate is to say and if you have the negation in the main clause it cannot be interpreted in the embedded clause i will give you a moment to look at the example then what about sign language well actually uh neck raising has had not been yeah studied in much detail there are a couple of studies mentioned on this slide that mention the phenomenon in passing these are studies on turkish sign language and australian sign language you can see for instance that in the australian sign language examples both involve in the matrix clause the verb to think there is a head shake and it spreads onto the embedded clause we have studied this phenomenon fairly recently for sign language of the netherlands and we did this based on grammaticality judgments the study confirms that neck raising is attested in sign language in this particular case sign language of the netherlands and what is really interesting is that the judgments we got show or suggest that the head shake spreading patterns are different in neck raising constructions as compared to non-neck raising constructions i think it will become clearer on this slide though this uh sorry these are videos that have to be judged the first one includes the main clause verb to think and the headshake spreads over the clause here's the example and here the only available interpretation is indeed that only the main clause verb is negated so this is typical neck raising the second example is very similar but now the main clause verb is to say here's the example and now the signer said well actually this particular example is ambiguous so it's different from the first one because it can mean that only the matrix verb is negated or it could mean that both the main clause and the embedded clause are negated and the second meaning is the one that we did not get for the first example so this shows that a phenomenon that we know from spoken languages a semantic phenomenon is also observed in sign language there's more work to be done on that topic and actually my colleague malus omen is busy investigating this in more detail but it's interesting to see that the distinction between different types of verbs triggers similar differences in a sign language okay now i have been speaking for an hour and i promised not to speak much longer than an hour so um let me see these are six or seven slides and i'm now thinking about how i could summarize them such that we also have sufficient time for for questions so what i present on these a couple of slides and yeah as i said i will just summarize it now is the idea that negation in sign languages also undergoes diachronic change so what i have shown is that the head shake which is a co-speech gesture may enter the grammatical system of a sign language but many of the manual signs that are involved in negation are also related to gestures and these are gestures like you can see on the slide that uh express your meanings like rejection or denial and we know from spoken languages uh and this i will not uh i will not go through but we know that negation systems undergo change such that a original negative element can be complemented by another negative element and then at some point the original element may disappear this is why it's called a cycle right so you have one negative marker then another one in the french case the word pa is added yeah it's more like to make it emphatic but then it loses its emphatic power it becomes a regular negative element and then the original element may disappear and the idea here is that maybe what we find in sign languages is similar and i present this on three slides but i will not take you through the slides the idea is basically that maybe it all started with just a manual element and then at some point the head shake which is a co-speech gesture was integrated with the manual negative element this is what i call stage two here and this would be a manual dominant sign language and then after a while the headshake may be reanalyzed so in a sense it detaches from the manual negative sign and it becomes an independent element an affix then we get stage three which would be a non-manual dominant sign language and then eventually the original element which in the case of sign language would be the manual marker disappears i know this was very brief but it's speculation anyway right because we don't have the necessary diacronic data from from from sign languages but what i'm trying to do here is to draw a parallel between sign language systems and what we know happened in a spoken language like french well to conclude what i tried to show or yeah what i tried to demonstrate is really the the yeah the broadness of typological variation that we find across sign languages i started with the two broad types of systems but i also proposed that this distinction yeah this dichotomy is probably not sufficient in addition i showed you a couple of different strategies to express negation and some of the findings at least suggest that in some sign languages the headshake is indeed a grammaticalized gesture it's part of the grammatical system of sign languages now my telephone is ringing i will go mute for just a moment it stopped i'm sorry just before just before saying thanks the telephone was ringing um so let me think uh or let me wrap up by thanking a number of people many of whom you see on the slide so a big big thank you to the interpreters and in relation to this a big thank you to my research institute who assisted in funding the sign language interpretation and then of course all the collaborators which were mentioned at various places throughout the presentation thank you very much i will stop sharing for now but if i need to show a slide uh for a question i can always start sharing again uh thank you so much roland for this wonderful talk very inspiring thank you very much and i also want to thank the interpreters guilherme and their song and also the audience we have people from different parts of brazil uh sao paulo parana janeiro uh alagoas and we also have people from uh other countries so i see sarah here from iran um and she has a question so i think i should go straight and ask you the questions from the floor okay so uh sarah asks in the example from a south african sign language could raised brawl be a topic marker she's smoking the topic and negation is actually a negated comment from for that topic yes let me think for a moment in this particular no let me start differently sorry so we do know that raised eyebrows across different sign languages have different grammatical functions and it has been argued that for topic marking and uh question marking are indeed related there is work by terry jensen j a n z e n who argues that this is also a type of grammaticalization so this is a very uh valid point yeah because he indeed argues that if you if you have a topic yeah my brother i brought up i like him then the origin might be something like you know my brother i like him yeah so you can see that there is a relation between a question in this case and topic marking and therefore the raised eyebrows are indeed used as topic and polar question markers so your point is that maybe what the lady the south african signer says is not a question plus an answer but something like as for smoking she doesn't right that's your point but please remember that the structure is a little different so it's not that she's signing smoking she doesn't but the pronoun she is in the first part yeah and this is why it in this particular case it's more likely that it's a question now because she says i'm like she's smoking no i hope that i hope the answer is clear so what i'm trying to say is that your assumption yeah that there is a relation between topic marking and uh question marking is correct but i think in the example that i've shown there is evidence that the first part is actually a question and not a topic thank you so we have another question here this is from luis gustavo uh his question is uh the patterns that you presented do they occur the same in the same way with irregular negatives uh i believe he's talking about those negations or incorporating signs so um for the time being only talking about the sign language of the netherlands when we did the corpus study we excluded these yeah but um of course you know with the irregular negative signs and i assume that this is what you mean uh and maybe for the people in the audience who don't know though modal signs for instance like can and want and and must they often have a special negative form and sometimes you can still see that the manual negative sign is somehow as andreja said incorporated yeah like uh politicized or fused but sometimes they are also truly supportive but the point uh now the question is whether the systems whether this would also um expand to these cases and um it's difficult to answer because in these particular cases when you have specialized negative signs of course there is manual negation yeah right um and therefore um my answer would be it's difficult to say yeah maybe i can add one thing uh which we found really interesting when we looked at the corpus dot data for sign language of the netherlands so it is often assumed implicitly if there is a negative model like if you if you can see me like can not yeah that you would also use it yeah and then there is manual negation of course what we found is a few examples where either the sign can is combined with the regular negator which is unexpected because you have a specialized form and i think we also found a few examples where the sign can is uh is negated by a headshake so you don't use the special negative form you use the regular one and you add a headshake for us this was unexpected but it's also not common [Music] thank you um so we we have here a comment it's not a question uh but i think uh i should read it um because i i i have a question about that so i will just use that comment for asking my question so gizelli uh uh uh says that in libras many mountings uh are used to mark uh negatives uh negative sentences i believe so i i wonder if you found uh in your data something like that i mean modeling being used to express negation the short answer would be no but i want to be a little bit more detailed first of all i should say that mao things are very common in sign language of the netherlands but what we did not find where cases are cases where negation would be only expressed by a mouthing yeah i'm not sure whether this is what you meant but this is not what we found interesting um i want to add one more detail andre if i may um because there's another study this is not about mouthing but uh there's a study by hannah lutzenberger and i think anderson knows how to spell the name anna lutzenberger on katakulog which is a village sign language of bali and it has been claimed for this sign language that headshakes are not commonly and that it is manual dominant now what hana found is that in this sign language you have a negative marker which is not a mouthing but it's a mouse gesture yeah and i will do it yeah it's not meant as impolite but it's a protruding tongue and this element again it's not a mouthing it's a mouse gesture but it can be the sole marker of negation [Music] very interesting so i don't see any other questions here but i do have a couple of questions of course i'm not asking all of them but i think we can talk later but i mean as i said your talk was very interesting and inspiring so i have a student who is currently doing research on libra's negation so um uh yeah so we we we have uh a thought about this uh so i hope you can help us find some answers for our questions so um so first of all um we we notice that sometimes um the handshake doesn't occur especially when the signer signs very quickly but in those cases um there's something on the face there is a facial expression and actually uh by analyzing a data where we do have the head shape we see um uh uh furrowed eyebrows uh compressed lips and or sometimes i think there is variation some some signers their lips and some signers use a harsh mouth or something like that right so uh so my first question is did you see something like that uh in in your data uh also uh i was uh wondering uh if a possible approach uh would not be that we have like separate things so the manual negation and the the no manual negation and you said at some point that they probably got integrated through grammaticization i was wondering if uh actually they are not like uh one thing you know that sometimes phonetically gets reduced so i don't know i i mean it's just ideas that i've been thinking about and i'd like to i'd love to hear about you briefly andre about the second part um what two elements did you mention that might have been reduced i'm sorry i missed just a short fragment right yeah so uh so we we we see very quick frequently that sometimes the hashtag is not uh produced but the facial expression is there right okay that's why we wonder if actually we have like a more complex you know uh thing with that involves handshake and facial expression and sometimes it is fanatically reduced okay okay yeah thank you okay i have a couple of things to say about it but i'm sure that we need to continue the discussion uh later but first of all when i mentioned the study the corpus study that i did with malus omen i said that all clauses were accompanied by a headshake and this is true yeah these were 120 sentences but sometimes you really have to look at the video many many many times to see it and what i call headshake sometimes maybe it's just a single sideward movement yeah and now we are doing another study on negative concord and we looked at the entire corpus and we extracted examples and now we do find examples where even after you know looking at the video over and over again we feel like there is no head shake yeah so this is this by itself is interesting then there comes the second point the facial expression because of course i mean in many of these examples you do find the specific facial expression i think you called it horseshoe mouth right like like this um it's obvious that it's common but we did not annotate it and then the question is well is this a grammatical marker yeah or is it maybe just you know like an effective expression that you might also find in in spoken language utterances and i think here again sign languages might differ yeah so i don't know in order to demonstrate that maybe in libras it's more than just emotional you would probably also have to look at the scope right whether there are certain constraints on the distribution and i seem to remember andrei maybe you know better there was a study and i mentioned it in on one of the slides by arrow taya hotel yeah yeah yeah and i seem to remember that she argued for libras that the facial expression is actually a grammatical marker yeah yeah so the study is in portuguese so i was i could not read all of it but i think this was her idea um and yeah i would find this first of all not surprising and secondly still very very interesting because there are other sign languages for which it has been argued that facial expressions are grammatical markers of negation i'm thinking of chinese sign language probably you know the paper it's by fischer and yang and they have a marker that they call nfe negative facial expression and i think they argue that it's more important than the head shake oh and then there was a a third part and this was about the uh phonetic re reduction right um and i think this would certainly be a way to to go right so maybe uh again relating it to jasperson cycle maybe the headshake and the facial expression you know they often often often co-occur and at some point one of the two gets you know from phonetically reduced and the other one remains yeah this would not surprise me this is also something you you find in spoken languages right so i know of spoken languages where you have a question particle which carries a tone and at some point the particle disappears and only the tone remains very interesting thank you so much um so we have some other comments here um from the audience so eloise grip from uh hugh janeiro is saying that sometimes in answers you can fingerspell no in libras so that's interesting um can i say something to this because uh i also find this very interesting so again with two colleagues and the name i already mentioned malus omen is one of them and the other one ulrika klump we wrote a paper about you know a very general paper about negation in sign language of the netherlands and in this paper we also looked at the negative replies or negative interjections it's sometimes called and indeed yeah one of the options uh is uh i mean you could say just the no yeah but i seem to remember that we also found the the fingerspelled element interesting so many other people thanking you for the wonderful and inspiring lecture and discussion uh angelica is saying that but also other people alini yeah so now now that i can see the comments i i see that there are many people i know that's nice yeah um so um if you allow me i'd like to ask you uh one more question um um so so i noticed that in in some of the sign languages you you uh are working on uh the the manual negator uh is like this which is the same we use in libras and i was just curious about how frequent that negator manual sign is across sign languages and i i also wonder where that sign came from i mean i mean apparently it mimics the the headshake right but i i'm not sure i never read anything about that but anyway i'd like to hear what you know about that i'm just waiting for the interpreter yeah i cannot give you numbers andre but this is something that ulrike zeschan looked at and she found across unrelated sign languages yeah that the handshape that you showed us this one either with one sideward movement or with a repeated movement yeah then this handshape that we have seen in a couple of examples can be one-handed or two-handed again with a sidewall movement that these are extremely common across unrelated sign languages and this of course makes you suspect that there's something you know underlying yeah might be universal about this gesture and people have argued that especially this one yeah comes from you know refusal or rejection and i think i mentioned a name somewhere on the slide and well this one of course uh as many of us know in in co-speed gesture uh it's also used for negation but also for warning yeah you do this again yeah and then you know um so so there must be a a common underlying um i don't know conceptual source and this is something that has been studied in uh in much detail for another co-speech gesture for the palm up now there's a recent paper by a cooper rider at all where they try to trace the different uses of the palm up back to one underlying meaning and maybe one could do the same for this negative gesture now this being said um not all of the common forms that zeshan identifies are necessarily used in gesture another form she identifies is this one yeah and here i'm not sure maybe it exists in code speed gesture but here it seems more likely that it comes from the meaning zero and you mentioned one more detail that i find really really interesting and this is the relation between the movement of the head and the movement of the hand yeah and this is something yeah for instance if you say yes yes yes in a sign language yeah this comes from the from the head nod and there yeah there's really interesting work on this uh and you can see in turkish sign language yeah where i have shown you that they have this element but also they use this and they synchronize it with the head movement so the first one you can only use with the head back and the second one only with the head shake and this provides evidence for what you suspect that there is a relation between the head movement and the hand movement so interesting yeah so i think it's about time to you can put unfortunately i mean we could stay here for more hours i i i i bet um but yeah so unfortunately we we have to conclude so uh i'd like to thank again abraleen the sign language interpreters anderson guillermo and also professor fau for this wonderful and so interesting talk i also want to encourage all linguists to uh in the audience to to become a member of aberlin uh this will surely help uh our field uh go stronger um so and to conclude uh i will hand it over again to professor uh foul for his final words and thank you again okay uh thanks a lot i i want to add indeed one thing uh i didn't put my email on the slide but when you google my name you can easily find it just in case if someone would like to receive the powerpoint presentation right i can make a pdf of it and i'd be happy to send it so i would encourage people just uh you know to contact me directly so this is uh yeah a piece of organizational information well and then i will just wrap up by thanking you again andrei especially because you took over this task on short notice and i think you did great and also to miguel oliveira who i think was the first one to contact me regarding uh this presentation and of course he did it's uh in the name of abralen so thanks a lot abralyn yeah and maybe one more time a special applause for our sign language interpreters thanks a lot all of you thank you thank you so i hope to see you again uh bye now