Kathryn Davison Harvard University

“What makes a word (but not a picture): Insights from sign language semantics”

Abstract: 

Recent trends in both formal semantics and in cognitive science have taken the logical/compositional structure of meaning in language to be a model for understanding meaning outside language, as in pictures, gestures, etc. Sign languages are an ideal place to investigate this idea, since both complex linguistic structure and complex depictive structure are used extensively in signing contexts, with the same articulators. In sign languages, we might then expect to see unconstrained semantic composition of linguistic and non-linguistic components. However, I’ll argue that instead sign languages provide especially strong evidence in favor of distinguishing linguistic from non-linguistic meaning, given the highly constrained ways that non-linguistic meanings compose with complex linguistic structures, based on three case studies: negation, quantification, and anaphora.