Course material

Course Materials

From the Academic Year 2018-2019

The whole course including course Materials will be accessible only via Schoology

Tentative Syllabus for Fall 2017 (pdf here)

The Status of Sign Languages

Slides

01 Introduction to SLs

Introduction to languages in the visual modality. We address some false beliefs about sign language

02 Deep into SLs

We look at arguments from cognitive science and acquisition proving that sign languages are natural languages and what could be the contribution of sign language to these two fields

03 Back to SLs

We look at some socio-historical aspects of sign languages and we show some similarities and differences with the evolution of creole languages from pidgins.

Readings (zip file here)

01 Newport, Elissa L. & Ted Supalla. 1999. Sign Languages. MIT Encyclopedia on Cognitive Science. MIT Press (pp. 758-760).

01 Goldin-meadow, Susan & Diane Brentari. 2015. Gesture , sign and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

02 Lillo-Martin, Diane. 2009. Sign language acquisition studies. The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, 399–415. Cambridge University Press.

02 Sacks, Oliver. 1990. Seeing voices. New York, NY, US: Harper Perennial. (pp. 93-97)

03 Emmorey, Karen. 2005. Sign languages are problematic for a gestural origins theory of language evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(2). 130–131.

03 Kegl, Judy. 2008. The Case of Signed Languages in the Context of Pidgin and Creole Studies. In Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler (eds.), The Handbook of Pidgin and Creoles Studies, 491–511.

03 Newport, Elissa L. 1999. Reduced Input in the Acquisition of signed languages: contributions to the study of creolization. In Michel DeGraff (ed.), Language Creation and Language Change, 162–178. MIT Press.

03 Senghas, Ann, Sotaro Kita & Asli Ozyürek. 2004. Children creating core properties of language: evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305(5691). 1779–82.

Optional readings

Nyst, Victoria. 2012. Shared sign languages. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach & Bencie Woll (eds.), Sign Language: An International Handbook, 552–574. Mouton de Gruyter.

Sacks, Oliver. 1990. Seeing voices. New York, NY, US: Harper Perennial. (pp. 13-24)

Veenstra, Tonjes. 2008. Creole Genesis. In Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler (eds.), The Handbook of Pidgin and Creoles Studies, 219–241.

Assignment Deadline: October 19 before class starts. (zip file here).

The folder contains the assignment in odt, pdf and docx format.

Chose the one you prefer.

Remember to hand in the pdf version (or a printed copy)!

SL Phonology

Slides here second day slides here

01 Phonology: Introduction to SL phonology

02 Phonology: towards a formal approach to sign language phonology

03 Phonology: the syllable, the case of movement Epenthesis in SL and Lexicostatistics

Readings zip file here

Chapters 3-4 of

Brentari, Diane. 1998. A prosodic model of Sign Language Phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Geraci, Carlo. 2009. Epenthesis in Italian Sign Language. Sign language and Linguistics 1. 3–51. doi:10.1075/sl.

McKee, D. and G. Kennedy. (2000). A Lexical Comparison Of Signs From American, Australian, And New Zealand Sign Languages. In The Signs of Language Revisited, eds. K. Emmorey and H. Lane, 49-76. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Assignment Deadline: November 9 before class starts.

In order to complete the exercises you must download the zip file containing the text of the assignment and the videos. They are in two separate folders.

Download the assignment zip file here. The assignment must be sent in pdf format to my e-mail!

Please let me know if you have any trouble in visualizing the videos. They should play well in VLC.

SL Morphology

Slides

01 Morphology: The lexicon

02 Morphology: Inflectional morphology

03 (Morphology: Derivational morphology) Not this year.

This lecture is replaced with a crash intro to ELAN annotation software.

Research tool: ELAN. To download the software click here . For MAC users, make sure you have java is installed.

Material to be used on the lecture of Nov. 16 here.

Readings zip file here

Sections 1 & 2:

Benedicto, Elena & Diane Brentari. 2004. Where did all the arguments go? Argument-changing properties of classifiers in ASL. Natural language and linguistic theory (22). 743–810

Fernald, Theodore B. & Donna Jo Napoli. 2000. Exploitation of morphological possibilities in signed languages: Comparison of American Sign Language with English. Sign Language & Linguistics 3(1). 3–58.

Pizzuto, Elena & Serena Corazza. 1996. Noun morphology in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Lingua 98. 169–196.

Assignment: Deadline November 30 before class starts

In order to complete the exercises you must download the zip file containing the text of the assignment and the videos.

Download the assignment zip file here.

Please let me know if you have any trouble in visualizing the videos. They should play well in VLC.

SL Syntax

Slides

01 SL Syntax: Introduction

In this lecture we will cover the basics of SL syntax and provide a formal account to word order phenomena.

NOT THIS YEAR

02 Syntax: Doubling in sign language

Readings

NO MANDATORY READINGS THIS YEAR

Optional readings

02 Cecchetto, Carlo, Carlo Geraci & Sandro Zucchi. 2009. Another way to mark syntactic dependencies The case for right peripheral specifiers in sign languages. Language 85(2). 278–320.

03 Shimamura, Koji & Lyn Shan Tieu. 2013. When You Can and Can’ t See Double: Revisiting Focus Doubling in ASL. UPWPL 19(1). 189–196.

03 Branchini, Chiara, Anna Cardinaletti, Carlo Cecchetto, Caterina Donati & Carlo Geraci. 2013. Wh-duplication in Italian sign language (LIS). Sign Language & Linguistics 16(2). 157–188. doi:10.1075/sll.16.2.03bra.

Geraci, C., Cecchetto, C. and Zucchi, S. (2008). Sentential complementation in Italian Sign Language. Grosvald, M. and Soares, D. (eds.), Proceedings of the thirty-eighth Western Conference On Linguistics, WECOL 2008, 46-58.

Assignments deadline: Deadline December 7 before class starts

In order to complete the exercises you must download the zip file containing the text of the assignment and the videos.

Download the assignment zip file here.

SL semantics

Jeremy Kuhn will teach this part of the course.

Slides here

01 SL Semantics: Introduction

02 SL Semantics: More Semantics slides here

Readings

Kuhn & Aristodemo, Pluractionality, iconicity, and scope in French Sign Language

Assignment

Semantics: Last Assignment here

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SL Annotation tool

Instruction for the Practical session:

1) please go to this website and download and install ELAN on your laptop. This is the software that we will use in class. It is a freeware software

2) download this video file here. We will use this to practice with the software.