Dachkovsky Svetlana, Stamp Rose, Sandler Wendy
Sign Language Research Laboratory, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2018 Dec 13;9:2202. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02202. eCollection 2018.
A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure - sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of language complexity. An added advantage of the signed modality is a correspondence between visible physical articulations and linguistic structures, providing a more transparent view of linguistic complexity and its emergence (Sandler, 2012). These essential characteristics of sign languages allow us to address the issue of emerging complexity by documenting the use of the body for linguistic purposes. We look at three types of discourse relations of increasing complexity motivated by research on spoken languages - additive, symmetric, and asymmetric (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Sanders et al., 1992). Each relation type can connect units at two different levels: within propositions (simpler) and across propositions (more complex). We hypothesized that these relations provide a measure for charting the time course of emergence of complexity, from simplest to most complex, in a new sign language. We test this hypothesis on Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a young language, some of whose earliest users are still available for recording. Taking advantage of the unique relation in sign languages between bodily articulations and linguistic form, we study fifteen ISL signers from three generations, and demonstrate that the predictions indeed hold. We also find that younger signers tend to converge on more systematic marking of relations, that they use fewer articulators for a given linguistic function than older signers, and that the form of articulations becomes reduced, as the language matures. Mapping discourse relations to the bodily expression of linguistic components across age groups reveals how simpler, less constrained, and more gesture-like expressions, become language.
语言一个普遍公认的核心特性是其在各个结构层面——语音、单词、短语、从句、话语以及更高层次的语篇——的复杂性。这种复杂性在一种语言中是如何产生和发展的呢？我们无法从口语语言中完全回答这个问题，因为它们都有数千年的历史，或者是古老语言的后代。然而，聋人社区的手语可以在任何时候出现，并为检验与语言复杂性出现相关的假设提供实证数据。手语模态的一个额外优势是可见的身体动作与语言结构之间的对应关系，这为语言复杂性及其出现提供了更清晰的视角（桑德勒，2012）。手语的这些基本特征使我们能够通过记录身体用于语言目的的方式来解决新兴复杂性的问题。我们研究了受口语语言研究启发的三种复杂性不断增加的语篇关系——累加性、对称性和不对称性（曼和汤普森，1988；桑德斯等人，1992）。每种关系类型都可以连接两个不同层面的单位：命题内部（较简单）和命题之间（较复杂）。我们假设这些关系为描绘一种新的手语中从最简单到最复杂的复杂性出现的时间进程提供了一种度量。我们在以色列手语（ISL）上检验这个假设，以色列手语是一种年轻的语言，其一些最早的使用者仍然可以进行记录。利用手语中身体动作与语言形式之间的独特关系，我们研究了三代的十五名以色列手语使用者，并证明这些预测确实成立。我们还发现，年轻的手语使用者倾向于在关系的标记上更加系统，对于给定的语言功能，他们使用的发音器官比年长的手语使用者少，并且随着语言的成熟，动作的形式变得更加简化。将语篇关系映射到不同年龄组语言成分的身体表达上，揭示了更简单、限制更少且更像手势的表达是如何变成语言的。
