The Necessity of Video Data to Study Variation and Change: Signed Language and Gesture Research

Erin Wilkinson and Terry Janzen

This workshop looks at two areas where video data are critical – signed language research and co-speech gesture research, with the aims of 1) examining areas of language use with respect to variation and change where video-recorded data is a necessity, and 2) considering how video-recorded data may be beneficial in all usage-based linguistic research. We take the view, following Kendon (2004, 2008), Müller et al. (2013), and others that language use is “multimodal”, that the actions, gestures, and stances of speakers contribute to the meaning of discourse utterances, so that to understand discourse interactions completely, video recordings are essential.

We begin with a brief primer on linguistic research on signed languages, and then discuss some observations on variation and change, e.g., in the pronoun system of ASL, especially in the use of SELF which has traditionally been understood as a reflexive pronoun, in the contact point of signs that canonically contact the signer’s head or face, and in phonologically fused and non-fused ASL collocations with a manual negation marker. Overall, we show evidence for language change resulting in the rise of new functional categories. We next explore some of the roles that gesture plays in spoken language use. Whereas gestures have often thought not to have very precise articulation, it can be shown that particular gesture patterns tend to appear in certain meaning contexts, despite some articulatory variability, e.g., in speakers’ gestures anticipated shifts/topic pivots in their discourse, and in recent study on deictic gestures in spoken discourse (Kita 2017).

In this workshop we hope to show how video recordings of language production and use are invaluable resources for investigating variation and change in the functioning of linguistic and gestural elements and how these might be integrated in a single language system.