This dissertation investigates whether transitivity distinctions are manifest in the
phonetics of linguistic and paralinguistic manual actions, namely lexical verbs and
classifier constructions in American Sign Language (ASL) and gestures produced
by hearing non-signers without speech (i.e., pantomime). A positive result would
indicate that grammatical features are (a) transparent and (b) may thus arise from
non-linguistic sources, here the visual-praxic domain. Given previous literature, we
predict that transitivity is transparent in pantomime and classifier constructions, but
opaque in lexical verbs. <div><br></div><div>We first collected judgments from hearing non-signers who classed pantomimes,
classifier constructions, and ASL lexical verbs as unergative, unaccusative, transitive,
or ditransitive. We found that non-signers consistently judged items across all three
stimulus types, suggesting that there is transitivity-related information in the signed
signal. </div><div><br></div><div>We then asked whether non-signers’ judging ability has its roots in a top-down
or bottom-up strategy. A top-down strategy might entail guessing the meaning of
the sign or pantomime and then using the guessed meaning to assess/guess its transitivity. A bottom-up strategy entails using one or more meaningful phonetic features
available in the formation of the signal to judge an item. We predicted that both
strategies would be available in classing pantomimes and classifier constructions, but
that transitivity information would only be available top-down in lexical verbs, given
that the former are argued to be more imagistic generally than lexical verbs. Further,
each strategy makes a different prediction with respect to the internal representation
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of signs and pantomimes. The top-down strategy would suggest signs and pantomimes
are unanalyzable wholes, whereas the bottom-up strategy would suggest the same are
compositional. </div><div><br></div><div>For the top-down analysis, we correlated lexical iconicity score and a measure of
the degree to which non-signers ‘agreed’ on the transitivity of an item. We found that
lexical iconicity only weakly predicts non-signer judgments of transitivity, on average
explaining 10-20% of the variance for each stimulus class. However, we note that this
is the only strategy available for lexical verbs. </div><div><br></div><div>For the bottom-up analysis, we annotate our stimuli for phonetic and phonological
features known to be relevant to transitivity and/ or event semantics in sign languages.
We then apply a text classification model to try to predict transitivity from these
features. As expected, our classifiers achieved stably high accuracy for pantomimes
and classifier constructions, but only chance accuracy for lexical verbs. </div><div><br></div><div>Taken together, the top-down and bottom-up analyses were able to predict nonsigner transitivity judgments for the pantomimes and classifier constructions, with
the bottom-up analysis providing a stronger, more convincing result. For lexical
verbs, only the top-down analysis was relevant and it performed weakly, providing
little explanatory power. When interpreting these results, we look to the semantics
of the stimuli to explain the observed differences between classes: pantomimes and
classifier constructions both encode events of motion and manipulation (by human
hands), the transitivity of which may be encoded using a limited set of strategies.
By contrast, lexical verbs denote a multitude of event types, with properties of those
events (and not necessarily their transitivity) being preferentially encoded compared
to the encoding of transitivity. That is, the resolution of transitivity is a much more
difficult problem when looking at lexical verbs. </div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation contributes to the growing body of literature that appreciates
how linguistic and paralinguistic forms may be both (para)linguistic and iconic at
the same time. It further helps disentangle at least two different types of iconicities
(lexical vs. structural), which may be selectively active in some signs or constructions
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but not others. We also argue from our results that pantomimes are not holistic units,
but instead combine elements of form and meaning in an analogous way to classifier
constructions. Finally, this work also contributes to the discussion of how Language
could have evolved in the species from a gesture-first perspective: The ‘understanding’
of others’ object-directed (i.e. transitive) manual actions becomes communicative.</div>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/7784954 |
| Date | 02 May 2020 |
| Creators | Charles Roger Bradley (6410666) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/Transparency_of_transitivity_in_pantomime_sign_language/7784954 |
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