Marion Blondel

Movement and Rhythm in Nursery Rhymes in LSF

O  the first studies dealing with poetry in sign languages (Klima and Bellugi ),1 dates from the first flowering of research into signed languages, a decade and a half after Stokoe’s () seminal study. Klima and Bellugi examine characteristics of what they term ‘‘heightened uses of language’’ in American Sign Language (ASL): plays on words and art forms and, more specifically, the sign counterpart of oral and written poetry, which they call ‘‘art-sign.’’2 Among the various features of poetic structure they examine, they pay particular attention to the formal structure of signs and to the way their arrangement deviates from ordinary signing. Of their observations, the ones that particularly interest us are those concerning rhythm.

Chapter 16. The blossoming of negation in gesture, sign and oral productions

The study of the expression of negation in longitudinal data of adult-child conversations is a privileged locus to combine multimodal analyses of prosody, gesture, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. First negative constructions seem to take over from early gestures of rejection and avoidance, but tracing the transitions between actions and gestures, and between gestures and signed or vocal expressions in very young children is quite complex. This presentation will focus on multimodal analyses of negation in the productions of five children between the ages of 0;10 and 4;0 interacting with their parents in various linguistic environments (monolingual French, monolingual English, monolingual LSF, bilingual French/LSF). A specific coding system was developed, combining the use of Excel, CLAN and ELAN with the video data and the transcriptions in order to carry out micro and macro analyses of the functions of the different forms of negation according to context in dialogue. We will present the individual multimodal path of each child and illustrate the continuum between contrary actions, negative gestures, signed and vocal negative constructions.