Open AccessAnaphoric Strategies Across Language Modalities: A Comparison Between Catalan and Catalan Sign Language (LSC)
Author(s) -
Laia Mayol,
Gemma Barberà
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of psycholinguistic research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.478
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1573-6555
pISSN - 0090-6905
DOI - 10.1007/s10936-017-9540-9
Subject(s) - catalan , computer science , focus (optics) , modalities , modality (human–computer interaction) , linguistics , natural language processing , contrast (vision) , psycholinguistics , artificial intelligence , psychology , cognition , sociology , social science , philosophy , physics , neuroscience , optics
The goal of this paper is to compare the different anaphoric strategies that Catalan and Catalan Sign Language (LSC) use by means of a parallel corpus. In particular, our comparison is focused in an examination of the uses of overt subject pronouns in Catalan and how these uses are rendered in a language that exploits the visual-manual modality, such as LSC. As far as we know, this is one of the first studies to compare reference-tracking devices in a spoken and a signed language by means of a parallel corpus and incorporating both a descriptive and a theoretical perspective. All instances of overt pronouns in Catalan were analyzed and most of the data can be accounted with three factors: topic change, focus and contrast. As for LSC, the use of pronouns is rare and only few instances were found. Instead, other anaphoric strategies are used: while topic change and focus are primarily encoded with bare nouns, the expression of contrast relies on modality-specific features.