NEXT SESSION

Tuesday, November 27, 2025 -  17:00 Paris time 

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SPEAKER:  Floris Roelofsen (U. of Amsterdam)  

TITLE: Polar questions in Dutch Sign Language (joint work with Marloes Oomen)

ABSTRACT:  

Polar questions play a fundamental role in communication and have been investigated extensively across a wide range of spoken languages. Much less is known about polar questions in sign languages. This talk concentrates on one particular sign language, namely Dutch Sign Language (NGT). It investigates (i) which polar question forms exist in NGT, (ii) in which types of context these different forms are used, and (iii) what the semantic contribution is of specific elements that may occur in polar questions. We present a production experiment in which two contextual factors are manipulated through role play between the participant and two confederates: (i) the prior expectations of the person asking the question with respect to the truth of the proposition that the question is about, and (ii) the evidence available in the immediate context of utterance with respect to the truth of this proposition. We identify a broad range of polar question forms, differing in terms of polarity marking (positive, negative, null), the presence or absence of question tags (among others, a tag whose function seems very similar to the English tag “right?"), and use of non-manual markers such as raised or lowered eyebrows, a forward position of the head and/or body, and mouth shrug.  We further observe that each question form has a distinct distribution across the different contexts of use under consideration. For instance, certain forms require that the speaker expects a positive or a negative answer, and others favor contexts in which a certain type of contextual evidence is present. With regard to non-manuals, a notable finding is that, contrary to expectation given the previous literature on polar questions in sign languages, raised eyebrows are not consistently used in the polar questions in our data set; in fact, brow lowering is also rather common. This leads us to suggest that a head or body forward position -- not raised eyebrows -- is the main polar question marker in NGT. We suggest raised and lowered eyebrows mark a broad range of other functions that may be relevant in (non-canonical) polar questions.

EARLIER SESSIONS

SPEAKER:  Lyn Tieu (U. of Toronto)

TITLE:  What we can infer from emojis: Experimental evidence for presuppositions, implicatures, and supplements

ABSTRACT:  

Emoji symbols are widely used in online communication, including instant messaging and social media platforms (Dresner & Herring 2010). But what meanings do emojis contribute to the sentences they accompany? Existing work draws comparisons between the functions of emoji and those of gestures (see, for example, Gawne & McCulloch 2019), with Pierini (2021) proposing that emoji symbols interact with the logical structure of the sentences they appear in, much like gestures interact with logical operators in speech (Schlenker 2018). In this talk, I will present some experimental studies of the kinds of linguistic inferences that emojis can trigger. Specifically, the results suggest that emoji symbols can trigger presuppositions and supplements (Tieu, Qiu, Puvipalan & Pasternak 2024); however, while we observe evidence for direct scalar implicatures, emojis in negative sentences do not seem to trigger indirect scalar implicatures (Tieu, Faehndrich, Sritharan & Schlenker 2025).

ZOOM LINK:  To be sent by email to members of partner groups who registered.

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ONLINE INTERACTION

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