LSA Meet the Authors Webinar with Tory Sampson and Rachel I. Mayberry

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Note: the following announcement is copied from the Linguistic Society of America’s Update #235.

Coming Soon: July Meet the Authors Webinar with Tory Sampson and Rachel I. Mayberry

Tory Sampson and Rachel MayberryJoin us later this month, on July 21, at noon Eastern, for our next “Meet the Authors” webinar. Authors Tory Sampson and Rachel I. Mayberry challenge the common assumption that ASL has no overt copula. They present evidence that one of the functions of the sign SELF in present-day ASL is as a copula. The sign evolved into its current function by way of a grammaticalization process called the “copula cycle” (Katz 1996). Join Drs. Sampson and Mayberry as they discuss their findings as published in their recent article in Language. The presentation will be made in ASL with interpretation.

Register for the webinar online

Tory Sampson and Rachel Mayberry have a new publication in Language

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Graduate student Tory Sampson and faculty member Rachel Mayberry have a new publication in Language, titled “An Emerging SELF: The Copula Cycle in American Sign Language.” The abstract is as follows:

We question the commonly accepted assumption that American Sign Language (ASL) has no overt copula. We present evidence that one of the functions of the sign self in present-day ASL is as a copula. This sign evolved into its current function by way of a grammaticalization process called the ‘copula cycle’ (Katz 1996). The copula cycle consists of a deictic item transforming into a demonstrative pronoun and then into a copula by means of a series of syntactic reanalyses. We present corpus evidence from Old French Sign Language (LSF) in the 1850s, Old ASL in the 1910s, and present-day ASL dating to the 2000s and the late 2010s, and with these data analyze ASL examples of syntactic structures outlined by Li and Thompson (1977) that led to the increased use of self as a copula. We also find that self, which is not generally regarded as a pointing sign, follows the grammaticalization scheme for pointing signs outlined by Pfau and Steinbach (2006), indicating that the scheme may be used for signs that are derived from demonstratives. Ultimately, we conclude that ASL undergoes the same grammaticalization processes as spoken languages.

JJ Lim is awarded a Social Science Research Council Graduate Research Fellowship

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Graduate student JJ Lim was awarded the Social Science Research Council Graduate Research Fellowship (SSRC GRF) by the Singapore Social Science Research Council and the Singapore Ministry of Education for his project titled `Investigation of agreement markers across Mongolian’.
The fellowship consists of a research grant, mentorship by faculty at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and an opportunity to visit Singapore to engage in research activities with NUS.

Recent publications

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Mayberry, R. I. (2021). The radical idea that ASL is language: The linguistic bulwark of Professor Robert Hoffmeister’s vision. Foreword, in Enns, C., Henner, J., McQuarrie, L. (Eds.).  Discussing Bilingualism in Deaf Education: Essays in Honor of Robert Hoffmeister. Milton Park: Routledge.

Mayberry, R. I. & Wille, B. (2022). Lexical representation and access in sign languages.  In Anna Papafragou, John C. Trueswell & Lila R. Gleitman (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon, pp. 597-614. DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198845003.013.27

Matchin, W.,  Ilkbasaran, D., Hatrak, M., Roth, A., Villwock, A., Halgren, E., & Mayberry, R.I. (2022). The cortical organization of syntactic processing is supramodal: Evidence from American Sign Language. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34, 2:224-235. DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_01790

Semushina, N.& Mayberry, R. I. (2022) Number Stroop effects in Arabic Digits and ASL number signs: The Impact of age and setting of language acquisition, Language Learning and Development, DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2022.2047689

Anna Mai has a new publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B

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Graduate student Anna Mai has a new paper with Tim Sainburg (Harvard Medical School) and Timothy Gentner (UC San Diego, Psychology) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, titled “Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition.” The paper finds that infant vocalizations contain long-range sequential dependencies, a property previously assumed to derive primarily from the complex syntax of adult language use. A summary of the article can also be found on Twitter here.

3 faculty members presenting at WCCFL 40

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Faculty members Andy Kehler, Sharon Rose, and Michelle Yuan are presenting at the 40th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 40), which is organized by the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and takes place virtually on May 13-15.

Andrew Kehler, In defense of referential theories of VP-ellipsis

Himidan Hassen (Independent scholar), Peter Jenks (University of California, Berkeley), Sharon Rose, A’-satisfaction with φ-interaction in Tira

Michelle Yuan, A pseudo-relative in Inuit

Tory Sampson attends Institute of the Inclusive Assessment of Multimodal Multilinguals (IAM3)

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Graduate student Tory Sampson will be attending the Institute of the Inclusive Assessment of Multimodal Multilinguals (IAM3), a two-week program taking place this upcoming June at Stockholm University in Sweden, The program consists of daily seminars about issues related to translanguaging in deaf people as well as training workshops of online methodologies including eye tracking, ERP, and fMRI.