Week of Feb 10

Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series

The first talk of the Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series this semester is take place on Friday February 14th at 12pm in the Fong Auditorium. Please find the details below. Hope to see lots of you there! 

Title: The Significance of History of Racism and Audism: The Influence of Educational and Research Decisions on the Study of Black American Sign Language

Speaker: Joseph C. Hill (Gallaudet University)

Time: Friday Feb 14 @ 12pm

Location: The Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall (1st floor)

Abstract: Since the publication of The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL (2011), Black ASL has been celebrated across mainstream and social media, boosted by the subsequent academic publications and presentations of Black ASL and the 2020 release of the documentary Signing Black in America, which is currently available on YouTube. However, this is not the first study of Black ASL as there are previous publications that have studied or mentioned Black ASL - formerly called “Southern Black Signing” because of the geographical origin of the segregated schools for the deaf in the southern U.S. states. Unlike the Black ASL project initiated in 2007, the studies of Black ASL in the 1970s through 1990s did not receive a similar amount of attention from the public or at least the professions related to sign language, interpreting, sign language, and deaf education. The discrepancy between the amounts of scholastic attention decades apart is associated with the intersection of racism and audism - the systems of oppression based on race and communication competence - which explains the socio-linguistic and -historical factors in the development of Black ASL and constrains the academic pipeline of Black Deaf scholars in social science.

LangCog

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, February 11th from 5:30-7:00pm! It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. The speaker this week is Tory Sampson (BU), and the title and abstract of his talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting, and you can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on their website.

Title: Phylogenizing the American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon

Abstract: Phylogenies in linguistics have been typically used to map language families back to a proto-language, but here I propose constructing a phylogeny of a lexicon within a single language. This has several implications, including insights into how human cognition shapes the distribution of linguistic constructions and how relationships between word classes may inform morphophonological theory. Focusing on the near-universal verb-noun (or verb-nonverb) distinction, I explore whether it is possible to create a phylogeny of ASL’s lexicon to track the development of lexical word classes. As a first step, I offer synchronic and diachronic evidence from ASL noun-verb pairs—signs that are phonologically similar except for movement and carry related nominal and verbal meanings (Supalla & Newport 1987). Specifically, I analyze how many verbs have noun pairs and vice versa, alongside additional lexical effects such as frequency, iconicity, and phonological complexity on their distribution. My findings using signs from the ASL-LEX 2.0 lexicon consisting of approximately 2700 signs (Caselli et al. 2019) reveal that out of 890 verbs, 50% have a nominal counterpart, while 98% of 1067 listed nouns can be traced back to verbal origins. Lexical effects on whether a verb has a corresponding noun are systematic and interpretable, whereas the reverse pattern is less clear. This demonstrates that a phylogeny of the ASL lexicon can be constructed using synchronic and diachronic evidence. Most importantly, the results reveal a striking trend: nearly all canonical nouns in ASL originate from verbs, a novel finding with significant implications for our understanding of human cognition and language emergence.