Presentation

Associate Professor at Université Paris 8 and SFL (Structures Formelles du Langage) - CNRS

I am a Maitre de Conferences (= associate professor) at the University Paris 8 (Saint-Denis) where I teach classes about formal linguistics, psycholinguistics and methodology. I am investigating the syntactic complexity of French Sign Language (LSF) through the formal and experimental study of subordinate clauses. 

Subordination and recursivity have repeatedly been argued to be at the heart of human language; in this respect, subordinate clauses are the flag holder of every understudied linguistic variety aiming at seeing its status as a language fully recognized. The main goal of my dissertation is to investigate and describe the possibility for French Sign Language (LSF) to display subordination at the nominal level as well as at each level of the clausal spine. In the first part, devoted to nominal embedding, I show that LSF has both internally and externally headed relative clauses and that the relative pronouns that it uses affects their semantic properties. By adapting a widly used eye-tracking paradigm, to the visual modality, I investigate how relative clauses are processed and demonstrate a clear Subject advantage in LSF. In the second part of the dissertation, I investigate the syntax of subordination of various kinds, and in particular sentential complements and temporal constructions. I show that LSF displays several types of complement clauses, either finite, non-finite, or introduced by a complementizer. As for temporal clauses, I show that they are coordinated in LSF. I then extend my methodology to analyze a specific construction, Question Answer Pair (QAP). I demonstrate that LSF QAP syntactic properties provide an important  missing link in the path going from questions/answer to free relatives, with LSF QAP being a step of a  grammaticalization process.

I also actively participate in the Kotoboo's project, a comics-based initiative that aims at providing care-givers with useful information regarding language acquisition in an easy-to-understand, science-based way.

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