Agenda

15 Dec 2025 12:15

Iconic shadows - alignment between two types of articulators

Sala Sarpellon - Ca' Bembo

Speaker:
Professor Donna Jo Napoli (Swarthmore College)

Abstract: Sign languages have a range of mouth articulations, among them "mouth demonstrations". One type of mouth demonstration that has not previously been studied is iconic shadows, in which the movement of the manual articulators aligns with the movement of the mouth -- in particular, the lips -- with regard to spatio-temporal information. Iconic shadows occur in classifier constructions in many languages, and classifier constructions have long been treated as nonlinguistic or as a mix of linguistic and nonlinguistic properties. We argue for the linguistic status of classifier constructions, and thus for the linguistic status of iconic shadows. That is, there is a rule that copies features from the manual articulators to the mouth articulators. Since iconic shadows lack analogous constructions in spoken languages, the study of iconic shadows underscores how the analysis of sign languages contributes information about the cognitive mechanism of language that we could not uncover if we analyzed only spoken languages.

Language

The event will be held in Italian

Organized by

Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, ProgettoEccellenzaDSLCC2023

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