Spring 2024 Colloquium Series Speaker: Dorothy Ahn

Fri 5/3/2024, 3 pm to 4:30 pm in Room 107 at 125 E. Main Street​​

Titl​e: Pragmatics of spatial descriptions: Sign language loci

​Collaboration with Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University) and Annemarie Kocab (Johns-Hopkins University)

Abstract: There are many places in linguistic study where it is difficult to decide where the study of language ends and the study of other aspects of human cognition begin. In this talk, I discuss a collaborative study on sign languages, specifically on the use of the signing space (loci) for marking linguistic relations. I focus on the use of loci in the nominal domain and the verbal domain, which have received a wide range of analyses from those considering loci to be abstract linguistic mechanisms such as semantic indices and syntact​ic agreement, to those considering them to be making use of non-linguistic mechanisms such as spatial cognition. We defend the view that the use of loci is both fundamentally linguistic (they are modifiers) and fundamentally spatial (they express an association with space), providing possible descriptive content in both the verbal domain and the nominal domain. We show that this analysis allows for a uniform and modality-general account of loci use in the two linguistic domains and accounts for an important, yet less noticed, characteristic of loci, which is that they are sensitive to the pragmatic need for disambiguation.​​