The 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) was held in Leipzig (Germany) during the third week of August 2019. Alexandra Navarrete González, a member of the LSC Lab and the Formal Linguistics Group (GLiF) at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, participated as a speaker. Alexandra is completing her doctoral thesis on informational structure in Catalan Sign Language.

At the SLE conference, different topics of general linguistics were addressed, and Alexandra participated in the workshop ‘Managing Information Structure in Spoken and Sign Languages’. At the end of the conference, three prizes were awarded in three different categories: doctoral researchers, postdoctoral researchers and poster presentations. Alexandra won the second prize of the doctoral category, with a presentation on contrast in Catalan Sign Language.

The study proposes that in sentences such as 'Giorgia is a linguist and Raquel is an interpreter' there is a contrast between the references 'Giorgia' and 'Raquel', and between 'linguist' and 'interpreter'. In LSC, this contrast is expressed mainly by body leans and head tilts from left to right in combination with the use of the opposite sides of the signing space to place the contrasting referents. In addition, based on empirical data, the study claims that in LSC at least three types of contrast can be distinguished: parallel, selective and corrective, which imply different degrees of contrastivity, being parallel contrast the least marked and the corrective contrast the most marked, that is, the one that involves a higher degree of contrastivity. All types of contrast are expressed through the same basic combination of markers, but those that involve a higher degree of contrast (selective and corrective) are correlated with additional prosodic markers: a repeated head nod in the case of selective contrast, and a head thrust in the case of corrective contrast. The results obtained in this research support theories that argue that contrast is an independent category in Informational Structure field, which overlaps with other notions such as focus and the topic.