L'adquisició infantil de les llengües de signes

[ENG] This article offers an overview of research in sign language acquisition by children, mostly in American Sign Language. The results indicate that the developmental milestones and the linguistic errors made by children acquiring a sign language coincide with those observed in hearing children acquiring spoken languages. The visual-gestural modality is shown not to have the expected impact on the acquisition processes, which is arguably regulated by strictly linguistic principles

Exploring the diversity of coronavirus in sewage during COVID-19 pandemic: Don't miss the forest for the trees.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of next generation sequencing (NGS) has proved to be an important tool for the genetic characterization of SARS-CoV-2 from clinical samples. The use of different available NGS tools applied to wastewater samples could be the key for an in-depth study of the excreted virome, not only focusing on SARS-CoV-2 circulation and typing, but also to detect other potentially pandemic viruses within the same family. With this aim, 24-hours composite wastewater samples from March and July 2020 were sequenced by applying specific viral NGS as well as target enrichment NGS. The full virome of the analyzed samples was obtained, with human Coronaviridae members (CoV) present in one of those samples after applying the enrichment. One contig was identified as HCoV-OC43 and 8 contigs as SARS-CoV-2. CoVs from other animal hosts were also detected when applying this technique. These contigs were compared with those obtained from contemporary clinical specimens by applying the same target enrichment approach. The results showed that there is a co-circulation in urban areas of human and animal coronaviruses infecting domestic animals and rodents. NGS enrichment-based protocols might be crucial to describe the occurrence and genetic characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 and other Coronaviridae family members within the excreted virome present in wastewater

Quantificational strategies across language modalities

The study of quantification traditionally focused on structures where quantificational meanings are encoded in determiners. Only as a later development attention was paid to quantificational strategies that rely on adverbs, or affixes. In this paper I discuss three varieties of quantificational strategies attested in two sign languages (ASL and LSC) and argue that even the apparent instances of determiner quantification in those languages make use of the more “constructional” way of encoding quantificational meanings that partially reflect the mapping onto tripartite structures overtly. Further, lexical quantification is addressed in the domain of distributivity.This research has been partly made possible by the grants awarded to the author by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2009-10492) and to UR-LING by the Govern de la Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR00763), as well as by COST Action IS 1006 SignGram

L’adquisició infantil de les llengües de signes

This article offers an overview of research in sign language acquisition by children, mostly in American Sign Language. The results indicate that the developmental milestones and the linguistic errors made by children acquiring a sign language coincide with those observed in hearing children acquiring spoken languages. The visual-gestural modality is shown not to have the expected impact on the acquisition processes, which is arguably regulated by strictly linguistic principles

Reduplication revisited: verbal plurality and exhaustivity in the visual-gestural modality

From the very early stages of sign language research (Klima & Bellugi, 1979 for ASL) and in subsequent descriptions of unrelated sign languages, a reduplicative morpheme in verbal morphology has been identified as encoding exhaustive distribution over a plural argument in agreement verbs. It consists in a sideward reduplication of the verb sign on the horizontal plane, where the repeated endpoints match the referential locus of a plural argument. It is often labelled as [+distributive/exhaustive] and considered a mark of plural argument agreement. However, in Klima & Bellugi (1979, p. 284) it was called “distributional aspect”, highlighting the link to inflectional aspectual properties. On the basis of Catalan Sign Language (LSC) data, this paper reconsiders the status of the alleged [+distributive/exhaustive] morpheme under the light of verbal plurality marking and argues for a broader analysis of reduplication in the verbal domain built on the category of pluractionality, in line with Kuhn & Aristodemo (2017). This change in vantage point allows for a better understanding of reduplication in sign languages as a grammatical marker of plurality cutting across the parameters of event participants, event times and event locations.This contribution has been made possible thanks to the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, as well as by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), and by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478)

On categorizing types of role shift in sign languages

Role shift is the widespread phenomenon in sign languages whereby a signer reports utterances, thoughts or actions of a character in another context by resorting to a possibly very rich array of nonmanual markers that imitatively depict the agent in that context. Such markers can include changes in eye gaze direction, facial expression, head and body position, and are mostly articulated simultaneously with manual signing. The stretches of signing marked with such nonmanual cues are interpreted by default with displaced reference to the derived context being reported. The literature that has undertaken a formal analysis of role shift has mostly focused on its use as a means to encode reported discourse, and it has addressed the question whether role shift is marking a direct quotation only or it encodes indirect reports as well. In this line of work, its use to report someone else’s actions has been often put aside, despite the fact that in spontaneous discourse both uses occur intertwined with one another.The research in this paper was partly made possible thanks to the grants awarded to the author by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68 594-P), by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478) and by the European Commission (SIGN-HUB H2020 project 693 349)

Twists of mood: the distribution and interpretation of indicative and subjunctive

The theme of this special issue is the distribution of indicative and subjunctive in languages that display this distinction in the mood category. Mood distribution and interpretation has not been deprived of enough attention in descriptive grammars and traditional linguistics, but it has never become a major focal topic in theoretical approaches. Mostly overshadowed by other verbal categories such as aspect or tense, mood often appears in the discussion of other phenomena as a co-occurring factor. Following the editorial statement for the ‘Taking up the gauntlet’ special issues of Lingua, the contributors were asked to address some of the questions and puzzles raised in the questionnaire below, which are meant to constitute a significant selection of the problems that remain open in the existing treatments of mood. These are presented in the form of possible questions around specific sets of data and theoretical gaps in the existing analyses. Obviously, each author has chosen to concentrate on one or some of the aspects pointed out in the questionnaire. In some cases, the issues are addressed directly; in other cases, only indirectly as a consequence of the specific analysis presented. As a whole, the five contributions provide a whole range of new insights within syntactic and semantic analyses. These are put into perspective in the concluding section of this issue