Abstract:

Nonmanual articulations in sign languages range from being semantically impoverished to semantically rich, and from being independent of manual articulations to coordinated with them. But, while this range has been well noted, certain nonmanuals remain understudied. Of particular interest to us are nonmanual articulations coordinated with manual articulations, which, when considered in conjunction with those manual articulations, are semantically rich. In which ways can such different articulators coordinate and what is the linguistic effect or purpose of such coordination?

Of the nonmanual articulators, the mouth is articulatorily the most versatile. We therefore examined mouth articulations in a single narrative told in the sign languages of America, Brazil, and Germany. We observed optional articulations of the corners of the lips that align with manual articulations spatially and temporally in classifier constructions. The lips, thus, enhance the message by giving redundant information, which should be particularly useful in narratives for children. Examination of a single children's narrative told in these same three sign languages plus six other sign languages yielded examples of one type of these optional alignment articulations, confirming our expectations. Our findings are coherent with linguistic findings regarding phonological enhancement and overspecification.

摘要：

手语中的非手工发音从语义贫乏到语义丰富，从独立于手工发音到与之协调。但是，虽然这个范围已经得到了很好的关注，但某些非手册仍然没有得到充分研究。我们特别感兴趣的是与手动发音协调的非手动发音，当与这些手动发音一起考虑时，它们在语义上是丰富的。这些不同的发音器官可以通过哪些方式进行协调，这种协调的语言效果或目的是什么？

在非手动咬合器中，嘴是最通用的咬合器。因此，我们检查了以美国、巴西和德国手语讲述的单一叙述中的口型发音。我们观察到唇角的可选关节与分类器结构中的手动关节在空间和时间上对齐。因此，嘴唇通过提供冗余信息来增强信息，这在儿童叙事中应该特别有用。检查以这三种相同的手语加上其他六种手语讲述的单个儿童的叙述产生了这些可选对齐方式中的一种类型的示例，证实了我们的期望。我们的研究结果与关于语音增强和过度规范的语言学研究结果一致。