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COST (ESF & European Commission), COST Action IS1006, 2011-2015 Chair:Josep Quer Vicechair: Carlo Cecchetto (Milano-Biccocca) Grant holder: Universitat Pompeu Fabra |
Language policies for signing deaf Europeans require reliable reference grammars of their sign languages (SLs), which are generally lacking or of limited validity if they exist. They constitute the basis for teaching and training purposes. In addition, descriptive grammars are essential for the documentation of a European linguistic and cultural heritage which is largely unrecognized to date. Making SL grammars available to signing communities, policy makers, linguists and to civil society in general will strengthen the status of SLs and support full participation of their users in society. In parallel, deepening the knowledge on SL grammars with a theoretically informed comparative approach will contribute to the characterization of the human faculty of language, whose study is severely biased towards spoken languages. In this way, empirical and theoretical results from SLs will have an impact on several domains of the current agenda of Cognitive Sciences. This COST Action aims to develop the first European network to design a blueprint for those reference grammars, which are indispensable tools. |
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The syntax and information structure of unbounded dependencies (SISUD) Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, FFI2011-23046, 2012-2014 PI: Àlex Alsina Researchers: Laia Mayol, Enric Vallduví; Ash Asudeh, Mary Dalrymple, Yehuda Falk |
SISUD aims to achieve a better understanding of unbounded dependency constructions (UDCs), which include filler-gap constructions, as well as resumptive pronoun constructions, from the point of view of their syntax and their information structure, and to provide integrated analyses of the syntax and information structure of UDCs. Despite the fact that the study of UDCs has been central to generative linguistics, since its inception, many issues in the syntax and information structure of these constructions are still inadequately resolved. SISUD aims to (A) make a contribution to the debate about these issues, (B) provide evidence to choose among competing analyses, and (C) provide new analyses to better explain the relevant facts. |
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A distributional semantic model for fully recursive phrasal meaning Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, FFI2010-09464-E, 2011-2012 PI: Louise McNally Researchers: Gemma Boleda Torrent
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No existing theory of how meaning is expressed via human language takes into account both the full richness of conceptual content and the recursive, structural aspects of meaning. The goal of this project is to take a qualitatively different step towards accomplishing this task by combining in a novel way the insights of two radically different approaches to meaning: that of formal semantics and the growing field of distributional semantics. Since the two paradigms have complementary strengths and weaknesses, in drawing on both of them the aim is to overcome their individual limitations. This is a pilot project whose empirical focus is on combining the semantics of nouns, adjectives and determiners. |
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Clause combining in sign languages: the grammar of complex sentences in Catalan Sign Language in a crosslinguistic and crossmodal perspective (CLAUSECOMBISL) Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, FFI2009-10492, 2009-2012 PI: Josep Quer Researchers: Celia Alba, Delfina Aliaga, Gemma Barberà, Santiago Frigola, Marta Mosella, Joana Rosselló (See also: LSCLab, Catalan Sign Language research unit) |
The project aims at investigating the mechanisms of clause combining in sign languages (SLs), a scarcely studied area in most cases, if at all. Empirically, the research focuses on Catalan Sign Language (LSC), which lacks descriptions of the relevant phenomena almost entirely. The project has two major goals: to remedy the gap in grammatical description for clause combining strategies in LSC and to contribute to linguistic typology and especially to linguistic theory with SL research, a domain that can no longer be neglected when trying to elucidate which properties of human languages are modality-(in)dependent --modality being understood as either oral-aural or gestural-visual. With these goals in mind, we resort to typological knowledge and theoretical syntactic accounts of crosslinguistic variation, which are in turn enriched with new data and insights from SLs. The project tries to identify and analyze the SL counterparts of classic subordination (argument, relative and adjunct clauses), parataxis, conjunction and disjunction along with serial verb constructions and clause-chaining. |
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Natural language ontology and the semantic representation of abstract objects (OntoSem) Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, HUM2007-60599/FFI2010-15006, 2007-2013 PI: Louise McNally Researchers: Boban Arsenijević, Eva Bofias, Gemma Boleda Torrent, Josep M. Fontana, Berit Gehrke, Mihajlo Ignjatović, Graham Katz, Rafael Marín, Estela Puig Waldmüller, Tom Antony Rozario, Cristina Sánchez Marco, Ayumi Shimoyoshi
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An essential part of human communication involves reference to abstract objects such as facts, propositions or situations. The goal of OntoSem is to develop a natural language ontology, together with a system of lexical semantic representations and compositional semantic rules, which will permit a semantic analysis of nominalizations and other nouns referring to these abstract objects. In addition to contributing to semantic theory, the project also aims to improve our understanding of the relation between the semantics of nouns and morphologically related verbs and adjectives, as well as of nominal complementation and modification. |
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Dependències gramaticals de llarga distancia: Aproximaciones teòricas i descriptives (DeLaDi) Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, 2007-2010 PI: Àlex Alsina Researchers: Lisa Brunetti, Joan Costa, Karuvannur P. Mohanan, Teresa Suñol, Enric Vallduví |
DeLaDi aimed to improve our knowledge of constructions involving long-distance dependencies (constructions with interrogative phrases, relative clauses, topicalizations, etc.) from the point of view of linguistic theory and of sociolinguistics. On the one hand, a theory was developed that unifies those constructions with others in which there also is identity between two grammatical functions. On the other hand, the project assessed the use of relative pronouns by Catalan-speaking students and their perception of these pronouns as to their level of prescriptive correctness, register, and genuineness. |
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Non-canonical constructions in oral discourse: Transversal and comparative study (NoCanDO) Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, 2004-2007 PI: Enric Vallduvì Researchers: Àlex Alsina Keith, Stefan Bott, Lisa Brunetti, Joan Costa, Josep M. Fontana, Louise McNally, Estela Puig Waldmüller, Teresa Suñol Ribas |
The goal of NOCANDO was to establish a crosslinguistically taxonomy of noncanonical constructions (NOCANs). The languages studied and compared were Catalan, Spanish, Italian, English, and German. One result of the project was the NOCANDO Corpus, a is a corpus of spoken narrative text. It was created by recording free picture based narrations of native speakers in the languages mentioned above. The texts were transcribed, annotated and aligned, using the Praat software. More information about the project and the corpus can be found at http://nocando.barcelonamedia.org/. |