Analyzing polysemiosis: Language, gesture, and depiction in two cultural practices with sand drawing

Human communication is by default polysemiotic: it involves the spontaneous combination of two or more semiotic systems, the most important ones being language, gesture, and depiction. We formulate an original cognitive-semiotic framework for the analysis of polysemiosis, contrasting this with more familiar systems based on the ambiguous term “multimodality.” To be fully explicit, we developed a coding system for the analysis of polysemiotic utterances containing speech, gesture, and drawing, and implemented this in the ELAN video annotation software. We used this to analyze 23 video-recordings of sand drawing performances on Paama, Vanuatu and 20 sand stories of the Pitjantjatjara culture in Central Australia. Methodologically we used the conceptual-empirical loop of cognitive semiotics: our theoretical framework guided general considerations, such as distinguishing between the “tiers” of gesture and depiction, and the three kinds of semiotic grounds (iconic, indexical, symbolic), but the precise decisions on how to operationalize these were made only after extensive work with the material. We describe the coding system in detail and provide illustrative examples from the Paamese and Pitjantjatjara data, remarking on both similarities and differences in the polysemiosis of the two cultural practices. We conclude by summarizing the contributions of the study and point to some directions for future research

Child language documentation: The sketch acquisition project

This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons

Review of Arbil: Free Tool for Creating, Editing, and Searching Metadata

National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Scaling Processes of Clause Chains in Pitjantjatjara

Clause chains are a syntactic strategy for combining multiple clauses into a single unit. They are reported in many languages, including Korean and Turkish. However, they have seen relatively little focused research. In particular, prosodic features are often mentioned in descriptions of clause chaining, however there have been vanishingly few investigations. Corpus-based studies of the prosody of clause chains in two unrelated languages of Papua New Guinea report that they are typically produced as a sequence of Intonation phrases united by pitch-scaling of the L% boundary tones in each clause with only the final, finite, clause descending to a full L%. The present study is the first experimental investigation of the prosody of clause chains in Pitjantjatjara. This paper focuses on one type of clause chain found in the Australian Indigenous language Pitjantjatjara. We examine a set of 120 clause chains read out by three native Pitjantjatjara speakers. Prosodic analysis reveals that these Pitjantjatjara clause chains are produced within a single Intonational Phrase. Speakers do not pause between the clauses in the chain, there is consistent linear downstep throughout the phrase and additionally phrase final lowering occurs at the end of the utterance. This differs from previous impressionistic studies of the prosody of clause chains

Do serial verb constructions describe single events? A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime

Abstract of presentation for ALS201

Event Distribution in Daily Life: A Replication Study.

Research in event cognition highlights the crucial role of event segmentation in shaping perceptions and memories. Anticipation of event boundaries is influenced by characteristic duration, often assumed to follow normal distributions in daily events. This study replicates recent investigations into event duration using a nightly segmentation approach with continuously captured daily images. Forty-one participants collected images over fourteen days, segmenting them into events. Event durations for various activities were modelled using truncated normal, exponential and gamma models. Our findings align with prior research in event distribution, revealing that overall, an exponential or gamma distribution provides a superior fit compared to a truncated normal distribution. This suggests that when daily events are studied in an ecological context at a fundamental level, most of them have little sign of a typical duration. Consequently, duration estimation is unlikely to play a large role in anticipating event boundaries

The prevalence of multitasking presents challenges for theories of event segmentation

Event cognition research has typically considered events to be contiguous in time, with defined starts and ends. However, people sometimes engage in more than one event at the same time. If this happens frequently, then theories of event cognition may require modification. This research study aims to estimate how often people engage in multitasking in daily life. Ninety-seven participants were asked whether they had been multitasking at four time points during the last 24 hours. Forty-five per cent of responses reported multitasking with a diverse range of event structures. Twenty-one per cent of reports specifically listed multiple overlapping activities. The prevalence of multitasking suggests that theories of event cognition need to be expanded to accommodate non-contiguous and simultaneous events