Dr. Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University) will give a colloquium in person on March 15th 3:30-5:00pm\, 2024.
Title: Information structure insight s from sign language anaphora
Abstract: Notions of topic and focus have been well-studied i n sign languages\, which - like many spoken languages - tend to have word orders highly influenced by information structural considerations\, along w ith perhaps some modality-specific considerations provided by suprasegmenta l "non-manuals" and other simultaneous layering\, the tight integration of iconic gestures into the grammatical structure\, etc. The use of signing sp ace/”loci” for anaphora is often considered to be another modality-specific feature\, bearing on questions about semantic analyses of anaphora general ly and how anaphoricity relates to other notions like definiteness\, givenn ess\, and contrast. This talk will provide both experimental and theoretica l arguments for how the use of sign language anaphora relates to informatio n structure in sign languages and by extension some existing questions in s poken languages regarding the relationship between anaphoricity and informa tion structure.
CATEGORIES:Featured Events,Featured Homepage LOCATION:Totem Field Studio - Seminar Room (121) GEO:49.256140;-123.249035 URL;VALUE=URI:https://linguistics.ubc.ca/events/event/davidson-colloquium/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ling.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2023/09/davidson.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20240310T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR