Vadim Kimmelman

Logic, Language and Meaning

This book contains the revised papers presented at the Amsterdam Colloquium 2009, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 2009. The 41 refereed and revised contributions presented together with the revised abstracts of 5 invited talks are organized in five sections: the first section contains extended abstracts of the talks given by the invited speakers; the second, third and fourth sections contain invited and submitted contributions to the three thematic workshops hosted by the colloquium: the Workshop on Implicature and Grammar, the Workshop on Natural Logic, and the Workshop on Vagueness; the final section consists of submissions to the general program. The topics covered range from descriptive (syntactic and semantic analyses of all kinds of expressions) to theoretical (logical and computational properties of semantic theories, philosophical foundations, evolution and learning of language).

Quantifiers in Russian Sign Language

After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Russian Sign Language, this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in chapter “ The Quantifier Questionnaire”. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Russian Sign Language, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

Question-Answer Pairs in Sign Language of the Netherlands

Several sign languages of the world utilize a construction that consists of a question followed by an answer, both of which are produced by the same signer. For American Sign Language, this construction has been analyzed as a discourse-level rhetorical question construction (Hoza et al. 1997), as a single-sentence question-answer pair (Caponigro and Davidson 2011), and as wh-clefts (Wilbur 1996). In this article, we analyze this construction in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) based on corpus data. We demonstrate that its properties show a great deal of variation, making it impossible to apply any of the previous accounts to the NGT data. In particular, we found both discourse-level combinations of questions and answers, and single sentence structures resembling wh-clefts. We argue that this variation is a reflex of grammaticalization of discourse-level rhetorical strategy into a single-sentence construction functionally similar to wh-clefts.

Signs and Structures: Formal Approaches to Sign Language Syntax ed. by Pawel Rutkowski (review)

SignS and StructureS: Formal approacheS to Sign la n g uag e Sy n ta x is a collection of papers published as a special issue of Sign Language & Linguistics 16(2) (2013); the papers were initially presented at the Warsaw conference on Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory in 2012. Since this conference was not devoted to one particular topic, the book is also not thematically homogeneous. Nevertheless, the motivation for publishing this collection is clear and commendable: Its contributions reflect some of the most important directions in the current research on the syntax of sign languages within formal linguistics. The topics discussed in the book have been widely explored recently, and these papers add valuable data, analyses, and theoretical implications to the debate. The first contribution, by Natasha Abner, is devoted to the ASL possessive marker poss, which can be used attributively (e.g., bruno poss book “Bruno’s book”) and predicatively (book poss bruno “The book belongs to Bruno”). Contrary to previous analyses, Abner argues that the attributive poss is derived from the predicative poss. She provides several convincing arguments (from morphology, syntax, and semantics) in favor of her analysis. For instance, she notes that the predicative poss but not the attributive poss has a transitive agreement pattern and that some of the word orders possible for the predicative poss are not possible in the attributive construction. Semantically, the predicative poss is more restricted: It can express only ownership (strict possession), but not other interpretations, such as authorship, so book poss bruno can mean only that he owns it, not that he wrote it. Focusing on the predicative poss, Abner shows that it is a verb: It appears in the same positions as lexical verbs, shows

Towards a classification of weak hand holds

Abstract The two symmetrical manual articulators (the hands) in signed languages are a striking modalityspecific phonetic property. The weak hand can maintain the end position of an articulation while the other articulator continues to produce additional signs. This weak hand spreading (hold) has been analysed from various perspectives, highlighting its prosodic, syntactic, or discourse properties. The present study investigates corpus data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and Russian Sign Language (RSL), two unrelated sign languages, in order to question the necessity of a sign-language specific notion of ‘buoy’ introduced in the discourse analysis of American Sign Language by Liddell (2003). Buoys are defined as weak hand holds that serve as a visible landmark throughout a stretch of discourse, and several types are distinguished based on their function and form. In the analysis of nearly two and a half hours of narratives and conversations from NGT and RSL, we found over 600 weak hand holds. We show that these holds can be analysed in terms of regular phonetic, syntactic, semantic, or discourse notions (or a combination thereof) familiar from the linguistic study of spoken languages, without the need for a sign language-specific notion of ‘buoy’.