Sandro Zucchi

Sign Languages: Functional markers in sign languages

It is a common observation that grammatical morphemes often develop gradually from lexical morphemes. Some languages show this fact more transparently than others. For example, Sebba (1997) observes that creoles and pidgins often use lexically contentful elements with the meaning of ‘finish’ or ‘done’ as functional markers signaling that the event described by the sentence occurs before the time of utterance:

Formal Semantics of Sign Languages

The paper discusses some issues that arise from research on sign languages in the area of formal semantics. Sign languages provide a unique standpoint to investigate semantic phenomena like donkey anaphora, indexical reference shift, and tense. Moreover, they pose a challenge for semantic theories, since movement verbs display gradient properties (semi-continuous variations with semantic import). The paper presents and discusses some accounts that have been proposed.

Games of Make-Believe and Factual Information

According to Maier, both (1), written by Tolkien, and (2), uttered by me, should be interpreted as prescriptions to imagine certain states of affairs, respectively Frodo’s having a very trying afternoon at some past time and Frodo’s being a hobbit born in the Shire. According to this view, a reader who understands correctly these utterances and complies with the prescription imagines that Frodo had a very trying time on a certain afternoon and that Frodo is a hobbit born in the Shire. The idea that fictional utterances, like (1), should be understood as requests that the addressee imagine, make-believe, that the content of the utterance is true is taken by many (Walton 1990; Currie 1990, among others) to be what distinguishes fictional utterances from assertions, which require the addressee to add the content of the utterance to her set of beliefs. On the other hand, the idea that (2), as uttered by me in recollecting the story told by Tolkien, is a prescription to imagine is disputed also by authors that accept the just mentioned characterization of the distinction between fictional discourse and assertion. For example, Currie claims:

Event categorization in sign languages

Abstract Spoken languages share the property of discrete infinity : an infinite number of meaningful expressions is generated from a finite repertoire of basic meaningful forms. Classifier predicates of sign languages, at first blush, represent events of motion and location in a continuous way, by exploiting handshape movements and locations in the signing space. Since movement and locations are regarded as basic components of signs, it seems that classifier predicates are based on a potentially infinite number of basic meaningful components. I examine different accounts of classifier predicates and argue that, in fact, they may be assimilated to demonstrative predicates of spoken languages.