Linguistics in Potsdam: LIP, ISSN 1864-1857
Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Year of publication
- 2006 (2) (remove)
Document Type
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- gesture (1)
- grammaticalization (1)
- modality (1)
- non-manuals (1)
- sign languages (1)
- typology (1)
Institute
- Department Linguistik (1)
- Extern (1)
This issue of Linguistics in Potsdam contains a number of papers that grew out of the workshop Descriptive and Empirical Adequacy in Linguistics held in Berlin on December 17-19 December, 2005. One of the goals of this meeting was to bring together scholars working in various frameworks (with emphasis on the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory) and to discuss matters concerning descriptive and empirical adequacy. Another explicit goal was to discuss the question whether Minimalism and Optimality Theory should be considered incompatible and, hence, competing theories, or whether the two frameworks should rather be considered complementary in certain respects (see http://let.uvt.nl/deal05/call.html for the call for papers). Five of the seven papers in this volume directly grew out of the oral presentations given at the workshop. Although Vieri Samek-Lodovici’s paper was not part of the workshop, it can also be considered a result of the workshop since it pulls together some of his many comments during the discussion time. The paper by Eva Engels and Sten Vikner discusses a phenomenon that received much interest from both minimalist and optimality theoretic syntax in the recent years, Scandinavian object shift. The paper may serve as a practical example for a claim that is repeatedly made in this volume: minimalist and OT analyses, even where they might be competing, can fruitfully inform each other in a constructive manner, leading to a deeper understanding of syntactic phenomena.
One type of internal diachronic change that has been extensively studied for spoken languages is grammaticalization whereby lexical elements develop into free or bound grammatical elements. Based on a wealth of spoken languages, a large amount of prototypical grammaticalization pathways has been identified. Moreover, it has been shown that desemanticization, decategorialization, and phonetic erosion are typical characteristics of grammaticalization processes. Not surprisingly, grammaticalization is also responsible for diachronic change in sign languages. Drawing data from a fair number of sign languages, we show that grammaticalization in visual-gestural languages – as far as the development from lexical to grammatical element is concerned – follows the same developmental pathways as in spoken languages. That is, the proposed pathways are modalityindependent. Besides these intriguing parallels, however, sign languages have the possibility of developing grammatical markers from manual and non-manual co-speech gestures. We will discuss various instances of grammaticalized gestures and we will also briefly address the issue of the modality-specificity of this phenomenon.