Language Variation and Historical Change in American Sign Language

美国手语的语言变异和历史变迁

• 批准号: 0925073
• 负责人: Ted Supalla
• 金额: $ 40.3万
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-01 至 2013-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0925073&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Language; Variation; Historical; Change; American

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The present research project is a comprehensive historical linguistic study of American Sign Language (ASL), asking how constructions of ASL have arisen and changed over the first several generations of its use. The core of the project is an extensive set of materials, already developed, that include translation, linguistic coding, and linguistic analyses of films of Early American Sign Language recorded from 1910 to 1921. The project will expand these materials to include contemporary ASL, by collecting video recordings and linguistic analyses from 3 generations of living native ASL signers from deaf families in the same two regions of the U.S. where the Early ASL signing materials were developed. This addition will make the materials inclusive of ASL from 1910 to the present. All of the materials will be entered into a digital format widely used by researchers in Europe and the U.S., to make them accessible to those interested in studying sign languages and historical language change. In the final year, the project will begin to expand this work to include materials on early and contemporary French Sign Language (LSF), a language historically closely related to ASL. Linguistic analyses of these historical materials will focus on changes in signs, sign phrases, and sentences expressing kinship and gender, number and time, and negation. Preliminary findings show that such constructions have undergone significant change in ASL since 1910, all showing a shift from expressing concepts in multi-sign sequences to expressing the same concepts in complex single signs. Precisely this type of historical change has also been found in many spoken languages, but has not previously been documented in sign languages.This research will contribute new findings on the forces by which languages develop and change. A main question in the comparison of spoken and signed languages has been the degree to which languages display universal properties and processes, and the degree to which the modalities of production and perception -- auditory/vocal versus visual/gestural -- alter the structure and processing of the language. It has previously been believed that signed languages display much simultaneous structure (as compared with the predominantly sequential structure of spoken languages) due to the visual/gestural modality. However, the preliminary findings suggest that many of the principles of historical change shown in spoken languages, including the common shift from separate words in sequence to complex morphology within a single word, may apply to signed languages as well. This project will ask whether, like spoken languages, sign languages also begin with sequential phrasal constructions and evolve complex word forms only slowly through time -- or rather, as has been hypothesized in previous research, sign languages have a unique tendency to develop complex word forms rapidly in their earliest usage, due to constraints and opportunities of the visual-gestural medium. This research will contribute to our understanding of the diversity and similarity of languages of the world and will offer the opportunity for deaf and hearing signers to learn about the history and culture surrounding the languages they use. The research team is headed by a Deaf native signer of ASL and includes native users of American and French Sign Language in the research team, thus contributing to the diversity and cross-linguistic span of research in cognitive science and linguistics.

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏与再投资法》（公法111-5）资助的。本研究项目是对美国手语（ASL）的全面历史语言研究，询问ASL的构造是如何在其使用的前几代人出现和改变的。 该项目的核心是已经开发的一系列材料，包括翻译，语言编码以及1910年至1921年录制的美国早期手语电影的语言分析。该项目将通过收集来自美国互联网的3代人的3世代，将这些材料扩展到包括现代ASL，包括当代录像带和语言分析。 此添加将使从1910年到现在的ASL包括ASL的材料。 所有材料将被输入欧洲和美国研究人员广泛使用的数字格式，以使他们可以使用有兴趣学习符号语言和历史语言变化的人使用。 在最后一年，该项目将开始扩展这项工作，以包括早期和当代法语手语（LSF）的材料，这是一种与ASL密切相关的语言。 这些历史材料的语言分析将集中于表达亲属关系和性别，数字和时间以及否定的标志，标志短语和句子的变化。初步发现表明，自1910年以来，此类构建体发生了重大变化，所有这些构造都显示出从在多符号序列中表达概念转向复杂的单个标志中表达相同概念的转变。 精确地发现了这种历史变化，但以前尚未用标志语言记录在许多口语中。这项研究将为语言开发和改变的力量做出新的发现。 口语和签名语言比较的一个主要问题是语言表现出通用属性和过程的程度，以及生产和感知的方式（听觉/人声与视觉/手势）的程度改变了语言的结构和处理。 以前已经认为，由于视觉/手势方式，签名的语言显示出许多同时的结构（与口语的主要顺序结构相比）。 但是，初步发现表明，口语中显示的许多历史变化原则，包括从顺序的单独单词到单个单词中复杂形态的共同转变，也可能适用于签名的语言。该项目将询问是否像口语一样，符号语言也从顺序的戏剧构造开始，并仅在时间上缓慢地进化复杂的单词形式 - 或者，正如先前研究中所假设的那样，由于视觉媒介的约束和机会，符号语言在其最早的使用时具有独特的趋势，可以快速发展复杂的单词。 这项研究将有助于我们对世界语言的多样性和相似性的理解，并为聋哑人和听力签名者提供机会，了解围绕他们使用的语言的历史和文化。 研究团队由ASL的聋人本地签名者领导，并在研究团队中包括美国和法语手语的本地用户，从而为认知科学和语言学研究的多样性和跨语言跨度做出了贡献。