Prizewinning study on grammatical structures in Catalan sign language
Prizewinning study on grammatical structures in Catalan sign language
At the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leiden (Netherlands) between 2 and 5 September 2015, the co-author of which was Gemma Barberà, lecturer and researcher of the Formal Linguistics Group of the Department of Translation and Language Sciences.
Being natural languages, sign languages are provided with complex grammatical structures like any spoken language. Hence, they can also include complex sentence structures and can make the distinction between active sentences (“the police caught the thieves”) and passive sentences (“the thieves were caught…”).
At the latest linguistics congress at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) held in Leiden (Netherlands) between 2 and 5 September 2015, Gemma Barberà, lecturer and researcher of the Formal Linguistics Group (GLiF) at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL), was awarded first prize for her presentation at the conference in the post-doctoral researchers category.
The study entitled Backgrounded agents in sign language: passives or impersonals?, conducted by Barberà in partnership with Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (CNRS/Paris 8), proposes a structure that had traditionally been considered a passive sentence in American Sign Language and Irish Sign Language should not be considered as such in Catalan Sign Language (LSC).
As Barberà explained, “for LSC we find two types of structures that place the agent of the sentence (who does the action) in the background: a transitive structure with an impersonal subject (“Han trencat el gerro”) and non-active structure (“El gerro s'ha trencat”). Based on syntactic and semantic criteria, the study suggests that neither of these structures can be analysed as a passive in LSC”.
Understanding the functioning of human language
Studies of this type allow developing theories of syntactic/semantic variation that contribute to better understand the functioning of human language as a complex system. The fact that such structures are found in languages of different channels (both spoken and signed) shows that it is linguistic features that characterize human language and that they go beyond the channel in which the language is produced or perceived.
Progress in the development of Catalan sign language
This study is another step towards encoding the grammar of Catalan sign language, a task which has been undertaken for years by the Catalan Sign Language Laboratory (LSC Lab), and also represents further recognition towards the characterization of sign languages as languages having complex grammatical structures that are part of our linguistic heritage.