Lunchtime Linguistics: How do you sign it? Exploring variation in South African Sign Language скачать в хорошем качестве

Lunchtime Linguistics: How do you sign it? Exploring variation in South African Sign Language

Speakers: Anne Baker and Kate Huddlestone Abstract All languages, whether spoken or signed, show variation. This variation can be at different linguistic levels such as in the lexicon or grammar. Recent work has indicated quite a high level of lexical variation in SASL and shown that the most important social factor is the school attended*. The research on grammatical variation is minimal and has been based on a limited sample. To study grammatical variation well a large database is necessary. We have set up such a database which will include linguistic data from school children, adults and second language learners. We already have data, elicited and spontaneous, from more than 50 SASL adult signers from different schools for the deaf across several provinces. This data is currently being analyzed. The challenge is to identify any variation and then to relate it to specific social factors. Age of the informant is a common factor impacting variation in all languages but for the deaf population this factor is compounded by the age at which diagnosis of deafness took place and the age at which the informant was exposed to SASL. Some participants in our sample were diagnosed as deaf at birth, but most were not exposed to SASL until much later. Many participants did not identify as having SASL as their first language. Does this self-identification affect the grammar of their SASL? This talk will explore these challenges and share some very preliminary insights. *Huddlestone, K., A. van Niekerk & A.E. Baker. 2025. Studying Lexical Variation in Sign Languages: The Case of South African Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 25(2):191-226. Anne Baker has been an extraordinary professor in the General Linguistics Department of Stellenbosch University since 2013. Her specializations are the linguistics of sign languages, and language acquisition and pathology. Kate Huddlestone is an associate professor in the General Linguistics Department, SU, where she has worked since 2002. She specializes in sign language linguistics, and also works on aspects of the syntax and pragmatics of Afrikaans and South African English.