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Historical origins in natural gesture for the emergence of ASL grammar
Degree and types of structural variation within ASL, considering the possible influences from its contacts with other signed and spoken languages
Role of visual analogy in learning ASL, considering the possible linguistic universals for signed languages
Ways in which language specific variation and historical change for signed languages may compare and contrast to those for spoken languages
Visual, motoric, and cognitive constraints which may give rise to these phenomena
课程概况
This course aims to integrate the history of ideas about American Sign Language (ASL) with research that has been done on the structure, learning, and historical change of ASL and other sign languages.
Structure is crucial to languages. There are several layers of grammatical structure in all languages. We will learn about these and examine how sign languages are structured.
Learning is how children and adults acquire the ability to understand and use a sign language.
Change takes place over time in all languages. Recent research on historical change in ASL and other sign languages has begun to reveal how sign languages come into existence and how they change as they are used over generations among deaf and hearing users. We will look at historical change in depth, especially the historical heritage of ASL.
This course is a four-week self-paced course. Lecture videos are delivered in ASL with English subtitles and voiceover. The course will introduce all of these students to the science of sign language research and, for fluent ASL signers, the history and structure of their own language. It will also expose students at the intermediate level to the fields of linguistics and the cognitive sciences.
课程大纲
Module 1
Fundamental issues for language status
Emergence and evolution of sign language
History of American Sign Language
Variation and change within ASL
Lexical representation and annotation
Cognitive processing
From transparent to opaque morphology
Literary innovation constrained by grammar
Framework for Sign Language Structure, Learning and Change
Module 2
Sign features and syntactic packaging
Co-articulation and timing of suprasegmentals
Interaction of syntax and prosody
The spatial architecture for linguistic scaffolding
Reference frame and spatial verb typology
Core lexemes and frozen derivatives
Layering of lexical representation and articulatory operations
Linear template and syntactic agreement slots
Optimizing loan words for syntactic agreement
Split between inflectional space and lexicon
Module 3
Biological and environmental factors for language acquisition and evolution
Challenge of designing a visual language based on English morphology
Potential impact of visual analogy on grammar
Morphological typology and complexity
The neurobiology of sign language processing
Reframing ASL as a classifier predicate language
Acquisition of ASL morphology
Best-fit architecture and cognitive scaffolding
Factors affecting homogenous use of sign language
Natural experiment for language evolution
Module 4
Sign language archaeology
Emergence of grammar
Gestural discourse dynamics and collective memory
Historical sociolinguistics
History of polyglottism and diglossia in Deaf community
Reconstructing early ASL grammar
From syntax to bound morphology
Development of bound morphology
The current state of sign language structure, learning and change
预备知识
None
