Homesign systems differ in significant ways from sign languages used by a community of Deaf people (e.g., Spaepen et al., 2011, 2013 on the lack of a count list; and Richie et al., 2014 and Goldin-Meadow et al., under review on the slower conventionalization of lexical items). However, the available evidence strongly indicates that homesign more closely resembles sign language than it does gesture. This evidence, unsurprisingly, comes from studies of linguistic structures that do not involve conventionalization among a community of users (e.g., Coppola and Senghas, 2010 on pronouns; Brentari et al., 2012 on morphophonology; Coppola et al., 2013 on plurals). In accord with the findings summarized above, careful consideration of the relationships among the individual structural components exhibited in homesign reveal that constraints across different levels of linguistic analysis are much weaker than they are in either emerging or established languages, which have the benefit of a linguistic community and/or linguistic input. When linguistic input is available, it apparently constrains multiple levels of linguistic structure simultaneously, but without linguistic input, cohesion and integration across components of the grammar is less apparent, and we can see the piecemeal development of sub-parts of both morpho-syntax and morpho-phonology.

# **CONCLUSION**

Perhaps because of the affordances offered by a language system using the manual modality, the notion of iconicity as a highly complex, multi-layered set of phenomena that are utilized in distinctly different ways in sign languages is often not fully appreciated. Brentari (2007) notes that while it is clear that iconic sources can be identified for many aspects of sign language structure, it is also evident that "arbitrary formal structure is present and observable at every level of SL grammar." Indeed, this notion is echoed in the present findings from one child homesigner, in which we observe a less iconic form (contrastive use of finger group complexity) emerging earlier in development than a type of iconicity that appears more straightforward (namely, hand-ashand iconicity). We interpret his lack of exploiting the hand-asobject iconicity as a consequence of the fact that, as a homesigner, he is building a grammatical system from non-linguistic gestural input.

These findings constitute evidence that individual components of a phonological system can exist before there is a full phonological system (e.g., one that includes minimal pairs and assimilation rules). In this regard, these results accord with previous

36Though also see anecdotal examples such as the following, from Feldman (1975) (and others discussed by Meier, 1982), in which a child homesigner developed a gesture referring to ice cream that used licking as its iconic base, and continued to use that form even in situations in which the ice cream was in a bowl, and no licking was involved.

findings with adult homesigners (Brentari et al., 2012) and children acquiring an established sign language (Brentari et al., 2013). Some adult gesturers achieve Stage 1 of our Distributional Model, where handshape is meaningfully manipulated (Brentari et al., in press) and signing children and adult homesigners achieve all four stages of the model, where the opposition of handshape in phonology and morphology is clear (Brentari et al., 2012, 2013, under review). The evidence we have described here shows that a single child homesigner has achieved Stage 3 (morpho)-phonology), but not Stage 4 (morphosyntax). The particular manifestation of these components in both child and adult homesign systems, while not deterministic, nevertheless generally accords with the associations seen in emerging and established sign languages. In other words, while a homesigner will not achieve the same level of linguistic sophistication, in both homesign and sign languages, iconicity is dismantled and reassembled in the service of a multi-componential system. Further, these distributional patterns do not reflect the patterns observed in the gestures produced by hearing people to describe these vignettes in the manual modality, who may astutely exploit available patterns of iconicity and their life experience with co-speech gesture and a spoken language and apply these skills to a specific gestural "problem" presented in a controlled task.

While it is difficult to generalize from a set of five case studies, we take the child and adult homesign findings as an existence proof that some aspects of morphophonology and morphosyntax can develop within an individual who is not acquiring a conventional language. Considered in conjunction with related studies, these findings also suggest that iconicity, in the sense of the hand representing the hand of an agent, or representing an object's movement or properties, does not entirely drive these linguistic developments. Nor is this iconicity easily accessible to individuals gesturing without voice (pantomime) who do not routinely communicate in this fashion. Ongoing analyses of the gesture descriptions produced by the communication partners of the child and adult homesigners offer an opportunity to distinguish these factors. Taken together, this body of work suggests that, while handling and object handshapes are ubiquitous and iconic, the various cognitive and linguistic roles these handshapes can assume cannot be conflated and must be investigated independently, and more importantly, analyzed distributionally.

### **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

We thank Julio, the child homesigner, and the four adult homesigners for allowing us to learn from them. We are grateful to the directors and staff of the Center for Special Education in Estelí for their support of this project. Anna Billa, Emily Carrigan, Julia Fanghella, Molly Flaherty, Deanna Gagne, Jon Henner, and Elizabet Spaepen assisted with data collection, and Dr. Claudia Molina and Leybi Tinoco graciously provided data collection support in the field in Nicaragua. We especially thank Lauren Applebaum and Julia Fanghella for coding, John Gerrity for creating the video examples, and Emily Carrigan and Russell Richie for comments. We acknowledge funding support from NSF grants BCS 0112391 and BCS 0547554 to Brentari, and NIH P30 DC010751 to Coppola and D. Lillo-Martin.

# **SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL**

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://www*.*frontiersin*.*org/journal/10*.*3389/fpsyg*.* 2014*.*00830/abstract

# **REFERENCES**

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 24 February 2014; accepted: 11 July 2014; published online: 21 August 2014. Citation: Coppola M and Brentari D (2014) From iconic handshapes to grammatical contrasts: longitudinal evidence from a child homesigner. Front. Psychol. 5:830. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00830*

*This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Coppola and Brentari. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Referential shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language: a transition from lexical to spatial devices

# *Annemarie Kocab1,2\*, Jennie Pyers 2 and Ann Senghas 3*

*1 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA*

*2 Department of Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA*

*3 Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA*

#### *Edited by:*

*Iris Berent, Northeastern University, USA Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago, USA*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Diane Lillo-Martin, University of Connecticut, USA Richard P. Meier, University of Texas at Austin, USA Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, University of Copenhagn, Denmark*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Annemarie Kocab, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 1050 William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Even the simplest narratives combine multiple strands of information, integrating different characters and their actions by expressing multiple perspectives of events. We examined the emergence of *referential shift* devices, which indicate changes among these perspectives, in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). Sign languages, like spoken languages, mark referential shift grammatically with a shift in deictic perspective. In addition, sign languages can mark the shift with a point or a movement of the body to a specified spatial location in the three-dimensional space in front of the signer, capitalizing on the spatial affordances of the manual modality. We asked whether the use of space to mark referential shift emerges early in a new sign language by comparing the first two age cohorts of deaf signers of NSL. Eight first-cohort signers and 10 second-cohort signers watched video vignettes and described them in NSL. Narratives were coded for lexical (use of words) and spatial (use of signing space) devices. Although the cohorts did not differ significantly in the number of perspectives represented, second-cohort signers used referential shift devices to explicitly mark a shift in perspective in more of their narratives. Furthermore, while there was no significant difference between cohorts in the use of non-spatial, lexical devices, there was a difference in spatial devices, with second-cohort signers using them in significantly more of their narratives. This suggests that spatial devices have only recently increased as systematic markers of referential shift. Spatial referential shift devices may have emerged more slowly because they depend on the establishment of fundamental spatial conventions in the language. While the modality of sign languages can ultimately engender the syntactic use of three-dimensional space, we propose that a language must first develop systematic spatial distinctions before harnessing space for grammatical functions.

**Keywords: referential shift, narratives, spatial language, sign language, language creation**

# **INTRODUCTION**

Sign languages often exhibit a high degree of iconicity, compared to spoken languages, as signs and their referents exist in the same physical space (Taub, 2001). One arguably iconic component of sign languages is the use of distinct locations in signing space for grammatical purposes, such as locative marking and verb agreement (Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Supalla, 1982; Padden, 1983; Meier, 1987, 1990; Emmorey, 1996; Lillo-Martin and Meier, 2011). The present study explores the emergence of one class of grammatical devices, *referential shift* devices, that has been documented to include both lexical and spatial means to mark perspective changes (see Emmorey, 2002 for a review). We ask whether the earliest devices that emerge in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) readily co-opted the iconic nature of space in the manual modality to mark shifts in reference.

When telling a story with multiple characters, a narrator must weave together a tapestry of information, integrating the perspective of the narrator with the perspectives of different characters to create a cohesive narrative. Signed and spoken languages alike employ a variety of referential shift devices to indicate multiple perspectives, and to mark when changes in perspective occur. To follow a narrative as it unfolds and to construct a mental representation of the event described, listeners rely on the narrator to provide information about the referents, their locations, their speech, and their actions. In spoken languages, narrators often use quoted speech to express different characters' points of view (Labov, 1972; Ochs, 1979; Schiffrin, 1981; Chafe, 1982; Tannen, 1982). English marks quoted speech with shifts in pronoun and tense, indicating a switched reference point for deixis. For example, in the sentence, "She said, 'I need more paint," the switch from the perspective of the narrator to the perspective of the character is marked syntactically by a shift from the third-person pronoun (*she*) in the matrix clause to the first-person pronoun (*I*) in the reported clause, and a shift from past (*said*) to present tense (*need*). Speakers can also rely on a shift in prosody to indicate quoted speech, changing intonation and voice quality to indicate something spoken by someone else (Clark and Gerrig, 1990). Because quoted speech is often not a faithful replication of exactly what was uttered at the moment of the speech act, but rather a reconstruction of what was said, this part of a narrative is sometimes called *constructed dialogue* (Tannen, 1986). Constructed dialogue can express not only a character's speech, but also his or her thoughts and feelings. If we change the matrix verb *say* in the above example to either *be all* or *be like*, ("She was like, 'I need more paint"') the quoted clause now indicates the character's internal thoughts (Blyth et al., 1990).

Like spoken languages, sign languages employ constructed dialogue, with a shift in deictic perspective, to express a character's speech and thoughts. Additionally, the manual modality allows signers to express a character's actions using a device known as *constructed action* (Liddell and Metzger, 1998). When representing actions, signers use their own bodies (*embodiment*) including the face, torso, and arms, to convey information about different characters and their actions. For instance, consider a story about a woman who enters a room and accidently lets the door close in the face of someone trying to enter behind her. A signer narrating this story could embody the characters' actions and reactions, first enacting closing a door with an expression of naïve ignorance, and then enacting bumping into a door and adopting an expression of surprise.

Importantly, the effective representation of multiple perspectives, through both constructed dialogue and constructed action, depends on clear and unambiguous marking of when there is a shift in reference. The narrator must clearly introduce the different characters, and when describing their speech, thoughts, and actions, unambiguously indicate which character's speech, thoughts, and actions are being expressed. If a narrator does not mark perspective shifts clearly, the listener may mistakenly attribute all of the speech, thoughts, and actions to a single character. As such, coherence and clarity in a narrative rely on the narrator's systematic use of lexical and grammatical cues to indicate who the referents are and when a shift in perspective occurs.

Referential shift devices similar to those found in spoken languages, such as pronominal shifts and pauses, have been identified in several sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, Swedish Sign Language, and South African Sign Language (Loew, 1984; Shepard-Kegl, 1985; Padden, 1986, 1990; Liddell, 1990; Lillo-Martin and Klima, 1990; Meier, 1990; Engberg-Pedersen, 1993; Poulin and Miller, 1995; Aarons and Morgan, 2003; Janzen, 2004; Cormier et al., 2013). Sign languages also leverage non-manual elements, signaling referential shifts through breaks in eye-gaze, head tilts, facial expression, and a *body shift* (Padden, 1986) 1 from a neutral position to a specified spatial location associated with the referent (Engberg-Pedersen, 1993; Cormier et al., 2013). These devices differ from embodiment, where signers use the whole body or a part of the body to represent a particular character's body or its parts, in that these non-manual movements of the body signal a perspective change rather than convey information about a character's actions.

Referential shift devices in sign languages can be broadly categorized into two types of devices: *lexical* and *spatial*. The first category employs spatially neutral lexical devices to indicate a shift in referent. For instance, signers can assign a referent a *lexical label*, such as WOMAN2 . Using that label, narrators can then introduce and re-introduce the character associated with the label, allowing the listener to understand when a shift to that character's perspective has occurred or is about to occur (for a review, see Cormier et al., 2013). An example of the use of the lexical label in NSL to indicate a shift in referent can be seen in **Figure 1**, where the signer represents the constructed actions of two different characters, one who lifts books down to the other, who receives them. Immediately before the second instance of constructed action, the signer produces the sign WOMAN to indicate a shift in reference to the new character who receives the books. This referential shift device indicates that the agent of the receiving action is a different character from the agent of the previous lifting action.

3Following the conventions in sign linguistics literature (see Emmorey, 2002; Cormier et al., 2013), a token of constructed action is indicated with "CA:" followed by a description in lower-case letters. The concepts described with CA are italicized. When a referent is specified, CA:x is used, where x is the referent, with angled brackets placed at the beginning and end of the CA.

**FIGURE 1 | An example of a spatially neutral** *lexical label* **as a referential shift device to mark perspective change in NSL.** The sign WOMAN in the third panel, produced in neutral space, is a lexical label marking a shift to the perspective of a new character3.

1This type of role-shifting, where there is a change in body position to indicate a shift in perspective, has been termed *contrastive role-shifting*. Padden (1986) argues that in contrastive role-shifting, at most only two roles can be contrasted. In the case of narratives with more than two referents, the third referent is introduced in a different (subordinate) role-shifting structure. The subordinate structure (the third referent and one of the original two referents) is contrasted with the initial contrastive role-shift structure (first and second referent). Importantly, the contrastive role-shifting structures are still associated with separate spatial locations.

2English glosses for signs appear in SMALL CAPS.

Prior work on referential shift in NSL has noted a second lexical device that has not yet been documented in other sign languages: a point to the chest (Pyers and Senghas, 2007). Using this device, signers point to themselves, explicitly indicating that they are about to take on the role of a character. This *point-to-chest* is sometimes, but not always, followed by a lexical label or a description of the character whose perspective the signer is about to adopt (e.g., the person with the books). The point-to-chest used in NSL in **Figure 2** is distinct from the first-person pronoun used with referential shift in ASL in that the point-to-chest is produced before the shifted construction, signaling that the signer is about to change to the perspective of a particular character and construct the actions of that character, with a neutral positioning of the torso and shoulders, while the first-person pronoun in ASL is produced after a referential shift has been established, indicating self-reference by a character.

In contrast to lexical devices, *spatial devices* capitalize on the visual-spatial nature of sign languages and the ability of the signer to associate referents with locations in the three-dimensional signing space in front of the signer. For example, in many mature sign languages, specific locations in signing space are first associated with nominal signs. Once referents are associated with unique locations, the signer can anaphorically refer back to these locations, using direction of eye gaze, pointing, or a body or head shift. Examples of spatial devices in NSL are shown in **Figures 3**–**5**. In **Figure 3**, the signer uses a body shift along with his constructed action sequences to indicate the switch in perspective between two characters, one who draws on a whiteboard and another who then erases it.

Another spatial device to mark changes in perspective is an *indexical point to space* (**Figure 4**). Here the signer locates referents in different locations in the signing space, then points to one

**FIGURE 2 | An example of the** *point-to-chest* **to mark perspective change in NSL.** In the first panel, the point-to-chest, produced with the torso and shoulders in neutral position, indicates a shift to the perspective of the first character. In the third panel, a second point-to-chest marks a shift to the second character.

**FIGURE 3 | An example of** *body shift* **as a referential shift device to mark perspective change in NSL.** The movements of the torso to the signer's left in the second panel, and to his right in the fourth panel, indicate referential shifts from one character to another.

**FIGURE 4 | An example of an** *indexical point-to-space* **as a referential shift device to mark perspective change in NSL.** The signer points to her left in the third panel to indicate a referential shift from one character to another.

of these locations before engaging in constructed action in order to indicate a change in reference to the referent associated with that location in space.

A third spatial device in NSL is the *spatially modulated lexical label* (**Figure 5**). Here a lexical sign is produced in a specific location in the signing space, rather than in the neutral area in front of the signer's body. This device, like other spatial devices, can be used at first mention of a referent to establish a character in a narrative, or in later mentions in a narrative to shift reference to that character.

The use of space to indicate the locations of and relations among referents derives from the iconic relationship between the spatial representations in signing space and the true locations of the referents in the world (Emmorey and Reilly, 1995; Engberg-Pedersen, 1995; Taub, 2001). This iconic use of space is prevalent across mature sign languages, and has also been observed in gestural communication systems, called *homesigns*, that are developed by deaf children with their hearing family members when sign language is not available (e.g., Goldin-Meadow and Mylander, 1990; Engberg-Pedersen, 1993, 1995; Emmorey and Reilly, 1995; Coppola, 2002; Morgan et al., 2008). Bosworth and Emmorey (2010) suggest that the prevalence of iconicity may stem from the gestural origins of sign languages, perhaps due to the functional pressure for clarity and ease of communication. As such, during the emergence of a new sign language, when gestures and homesigns are reorganized into a structured language, one might expect to see creators of a new sign language readily avail themselves of the iconic nature of space to structure narratives.

Because the signer's body can represent multiple characters and their different perspectives, as well as the signer's own perspective as the narrator, signers of mature sign languages generate different types of formats in their iconic representations of realworld spatial relations; these format types differ in perspective. One spatial format, *diagrammatic* space, situates the signer outside of the event, describing it from an observer's point of view (as in **Figure 5**). A second spatial format, *viewer* space, locates the signer within the event itself, describing it from an experiencer's point of view (as in **Figure 3**), and expressing any spatial relations relative to the character's first-person perspective (Emmorey and Falgier, 1999) (see **Figure 6**) 4 . Using these spatial representations, signers convey information about objects and characters, their locations, and spatial relations.

Further, the signer has two options for representing the signing space (see **Figures 7**, **9**): the signer can use the front-back axis or the left-right axis (Padden, 1986). When using left-right spatial contrasts, signers set up a referent on one side of the signing space (either left or right) and contrast it with a second referent set up on the opposite side of the signing space (Emmorey, 2002), as in **Figure 5**. With front-back spatial relations, signers tend to

4Other terminology for these two spatial formats include observer perspective vs. character perspective (Perniss, 2007), depictive vs. surrogate space (Liddell, 2003), and narrator vs. protagonist perspective (Slobin et al., 2003).

**FIGURE 5 | An example of** *spatially modulated lexical labels* **in NSL.** In the first panel, the signer produces the sign WOMAN to his right, thereby associating the first woman with that location. In the second panel, he produces the sign WOMAN to his left, associating the second woman with that second location.

**FIGURE 8 | An example of a front-back spatial layout within diagrammatic space in NSL.** The signer's point to a spatial location in front of the signer in the second panel associates that spatial location with the character of the second woman.

embody an animate character, and use the body as a locus with respect to which other characters or objects are assigned locations, in front of or behind the signer, as in **Figure 8** (Emmorey, 2002; Perniss, 2007).

In mature sign languages, the preferred layout can depend on format. In ASL, diagrammatic space is typically used with leftright spatial contrasts, where the signer is narrating from the perspective of an observer, and contrasting referents are set up in front of the signer in the signing space. When using a viewer space format, where the signer is narrating from the perspective of a character, both left-right and front-back spatial contrasts can be used (Emmorey, 2002). These patterns have been found in ASL, a well-documented and mature sign language; we might expect to see different patterns of spatial layouts and formats cross-linguistically, and in a younger, emerging sign language.

Though the placement of referents in signing space is often iconic and derives its structure from the relative locations of objects in the world, spatial signing is not necessarily transparent (Emmorey and Reilly, 1995). As a signer narrates a story, the listener must construct a mental representation of the event, relying on the spatial information presented by the signer. As the narrative unfolds, the listener must continually map new information onto the developing mental image (Givón, 1995; Gernsbacher, 1997). Thus, narrative comprehension in sign languages is partly dependent on the signer's establishment and maintenance of the distinct spatial relationships among the referents throughout the narrative, particularly for short narratives of a specific event or situation5 , such that the listener knows which referent's speech and actions are being represented (Winston, 1991). With such spatial consistency a subtle shift of the body or head relative to a spatial location associated with a referent can be sufficient to communicate a change in perspective (Emmorey, 2002).

To appreciate why setting up referents in spatial locations is crucial for narrative coherence, consider a signer who uses the body to represent multiple perspectives, via constructed action, but does not overtly mark when perspective changes occur. In such a situation, the listener may correctly understand that the narrator is telling a story about, say, one man who was walking and another man who was eating. Alternatively, the listener could easily misinterpret the account to be that a single man was walking and eating. Lexical devices could disambiguate which characters performed specific actions, without providing spatial information that reveals how the characters are located relative to one another. However, for spatial devices to be understood correctly, the signer must consistently map the different referents to contrastive locations in the signing space, across multiple signs, including constructed action sequences. As such, signers sometimes use non-spatial explicit referential shift devices such as lexical labels alongside spatial devices such as a body shift to make the referent more salient than it would be with the spatial device alone (Cormier et al., 2013).

The present study examined the origins of these complex grammatical systems. We follow the development of spatial and lexical grammatical devices for marking referential shift in an emerging sign language. By examining the early stages of a young sign language, we asked whether the richness of the spatial iconicity prevalent in the manual modality motivates early emergence of spatial devices in a new sign language.

The language under consideration emerged over the past four decades in Managua, the urban capital of Nicaragua. Prior to the 1970s, there was no established sign language in use in Nicaragua, but special education reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought about drastic changes. With the opening of a primary school for special education, followed by a vocational center, deaf children and adolescents were able to socialize in greater numbers than ever before, giving rise to the birth of a new language (Kegl and Iwata, 1989; Polich, 2005). An initial group of fifty signers passed on their developing language to waves of new children entering the community each year, who, in turn, continued to add to the language's complexity and development (Senghas, 1995; Senghas and Coppola, 2001). By comparing the language of that initial *first cohort* of signers to that of those who entered in the language's second decade, the *second cohort*, we can see how the language has changed and grown.

The recent emergence of NSL offers the opportunity to examine when referential shift devices emerge in a language, which devices emerge first, and whether early-emerging devices differ from later-emerging devices in their use of space. We investigated the distribution and frequency of use of specific referential shift devices in NSL, and the pattern of device use between cohorts. If the creators of a new sign language can immediately harness the iconic nature of three-dimensional space, one might expect to see early emergence of spatial devices to consistently mark referential shift in the first cohort of Nicaraguan signers.

# **MATERIAL AND METHODS PARTICIPANTS**

Eighteen deaf Nicaraguan signers participated in the study, ranging in age from 21.4 to 40.0 years. We grouped participants into two cohorts according to the year they were first exposed to NSL when they entered the primary school for special education (Senghas, 1995): 8 first-cohort signers (5 M, 3 F, *Mage* = 33*.*1 years) were exposed to NSL before 1986, and 10 second cohort signers (6 M, 4 F, *Mage* = 24*.*0 years) were exposed to NSL between 1986 and 1990. All participants were exposed to NSL by the age of 6 (Cohort 1 mean age of exposure: 4.6 years; Cohort 2 mean age of exposure: 4.0 years). All participants gave consent to participate and be videotaped as part of this study, and all were paid for their participation. The research protocol was approved by the Barnard College Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research and by the Wellesley College Psychology Department Research Ethics Committee.

# **MATERIALS**

Participants were shown six video vignettes, presented as QuickTime movies on a laptop computer. The vignettes were 10– 30 s in duration, depicting simple events that included two or three characters performing straightforward actions with no dialogue (**Table 1**). The vignettes were designed to eliminate the need for participants to make inferences about internal states to understand the actions depicted. Accordingly, the actions performed by the characters did not imply any hidden beliefs or intentions. For example, signers could (and often did) produce descriptions of Video #3 like, "The woman on the left was drawing on a whiteboard" (see **Table 1**). Of course, participants' responses could include descriptions of the characters' emotions or mental states; narrative information that goes beyond what is said is often a part of constructed dialogue.

# **PROCEDURE AND CODING**

Participants watched each vignette and were instructed in NSL to "describe [to another signer from their cohort] what you saw." Participants were permitted to watch the movies as many times as they liked. Narratives were videotaped (30 fps) for coding offline. Elicited narratives were coded by the first author, who is a fluent signer of ASL with 6 years of research experience with NSL, for (1) average length of the narrative, (2) proportion of perspectives represented, (3) use of space to assign spatial locations to referents, and the spatial format and spatial layouts used, (4) overt marking of referential shifts, and (5) types of referential shift devices used.

The average length of each narrative was computed in seconds. The counter started from the moment the signers lifted their hands until they dropped their hands, signaling the end of the narrative. The length of the narrative was calculated to check whether a greater number of perspectives represented might be a simple consequence of longer narratives.

5In longer narratives, the signer may reset the spatial locations associated with referents, using different loci at different points in the story (van Hoek, 1992).

Because the number of characters in the vignettes varied (see **Table 1**), we calculated the proportion, rather than the sum, of perspectives represented. This proportion was defined as the sum of perspectives represented by the signer divided by the total number of possible perspectives included in the narrative (the number of characters in the narrative plus the signer's perspective as the narrator; **Table 1**). Signers were coded as having represented the narrator's perspective if the signer included commentary or descriptive information from the signer's own perspective. Signers were coded as having represented a given character's perspective if the signer engaged in constructed action representing that character's perspective, such as imitating the facial expression, body posture/orientation or actions of the character, with a maximum score of 1 for each character, regardless of how many times that character's perspective was represented. For instance, if the signer was describing Video #3 and imitated the action of erasing a whiteboard, that sequence was coded as constructed action, representing the perspective of the character who did the erasing. Crucially, credit was given for representing a character's perspective even if the signer did not grammatically mark the perspective shift. Indeed, to someone naive to the video stimuli, many of the representations of the actions of multiple characters were produced without such marking, and could consequently be misinterpreted as multiple actions by a single character. For example, a listener might interpret a signed narrative with instances of constructed action of drawing and erasing either as a single character who is drawing and then erasing her own picture, or as two different characters, one who draws a picture and one who erases it. We included this measure of the number of perspectives represented to capture only whether participants explicitly encoded and expressed the actions of the different characters.

In addition, we coded whether signers assigned spatial locations to the referents at the beginning of each narrative, and whether they implemented a diagrammatic or viewer spatial format. We further looked at whether signers used front-back or left-right spatial layouts when assigning spatial locations to referents.

Signed narratives were also coded for the use of five types of referential shift devices that have been previously observed in NSL (Pyers and Senghas, 2007): *lexical label*, *point-to-chest*, *body shift*, *indexical point-to-space*, and *spatially modulated lexical label* (see **Table 2**). *Lexical label* and *point-to-chest* are lexical, non-spatial devices that indicate shifting to a particular character's perspective (see **Figures 1**, **2**). *Body shift, indexical point-to-space,* and *spatially modulated lexical label* are spatial devices that associate physical locations in the signing space with particular referents (see **Figures 3**–**5**). The use of a referential shift device was coded as positive whenever the signer employed the device before

#### **Table 1 | Stimulus characteristics.**

#### **Table 2 | Referential shift devices.**

introducing or re-introducing a character's or the narrator's perspective, and when shifting between perspectives. We coded the use of these devices only if they were used to indicate a shift in the referent before the signer engaged in constructed action, using his or her body to represent the perspective of the character, expressing the character's actions or feelings.

We analyzed only whether a particular device was present in each narrative, not the frequency with which that particular device appeared in the narrative. For instance, if a signer used all five referential shift devices while describing one vignette, that narrative would receive a 1 for each type of referential shift device. In cases where the signer used multiple devices to mark a single referential shift, each type of device used was coded as present.

#### **RESULTS**

First, we considered the average length of signers' narratives in the two age cohorts to determine whether any difference in the number of perspectives represented might be a reflection of the amount of time spent describing the events. The average signing time did not differ significantly between cohorts [Cohort 2: 15.50 s, *SD* = 5*.*55; Cohort 1: 12.50 s, *SD* = 4*.*39, *t*(16) = 1*.*29, *p* = 0*.*22, two-tailed]. Each vignette contained multiple characters, and we measured the proportion of characters whose perspectives were represented or mentioned by signers in their narratives. Both cohorts expressed the majority of available perspectives in each narrative (see **Table 3** for means and standard deviations). There was a marginally significant difference between the two cohorts in the number of perspectives represented [*t*(7*.*30) = 2*.*33, *p* = 0*.*07, two-tailed, adjusted for unequal variances], although a Levene's test showed that the first cohort signers were significantly more variable in their performance (*F* = 13*.*75, *p <* 0*.*01). This difference between cohorts in the number of perspectives represented was driven primarily by the inclusion of explicit marking of and shifts between the perspective of the narrator and of a character. Since the narratives were not based on first-hand accounts, and were always told from the perspective of an outside observer (that is, the signer as the narrator), we conducted an additional analysis comparing the proportion of perspectives represented aside from that of the narrator, and

**Table 3 | Proportion of perspectives represented, and proportion of narratives in which signers set up referents in space, and used front-back and left-right spatial layouts, by each cohort.**

*Standard deviations given in parentheses.*

found no significant difference between cohorts [**Table 3**, *t*(8*.*96) = 1*.*52, *p* = 0*.*20, two-tailed, adjusted for unequal variances, *F* = 9*.*71, *p <* 0*.*01]. According to this analysis, signers from both cohorts were similarly able to represent the perspectives of the characters in their narratives.

Next, we examined whether signers differed in their assignment of spatial locations to referents at the beginning of each narrative. Due to the categorical nature of the dependent variables, and because we were conducting between-subjects analyses, we used logistic mixed effects regression with item (video) and subject as random effects, where the use of space to assign spatial locations to referents and the absence of use of space were entered as 1 and 0, respectively. In the model, we looked at the effect of cohort on whether signers assigned spatial locations when describing the videos. The predictor variable, cohort, was coded such that the first cohort (signers who entered the community prior to 1986) represented the baseline (the intercept). Positive and negative coefficients are interpreted with respect to this intercept value, where a positive coefficient (β) represents an increase in the likelihood of the second cohort using the dependent variable of interest, and a negative coefficient represents a decrease. Accordingly, we report the coefficient representing the second cohort, indicating the difference from the first cohort, followed by Wald's z-score.

There was no difference between the two cohorts in how many narratives included the use of space for assignment of spatial locations to referents (β = 3*.*52, *Z* = 0*.*00, *p* = 1*.*00). We then considered whether the two cohorts differed in their use of diagrammatic and viewer space in their narratives. Second-cohort signers used diagrammatic space significantly more than firstcohort signers (β = 3*.*10, *Z* = 3*.*84, *p <* 0*.*001), but signers from the two cohorts did not differ in their use of viewer space (β = 3*.*41, *Z* = 0*.*00, *p* = 0*.*99). Note that signers can and did use both spatial formats within a single narrative. We then considered the frequency with which the two types of spatial layouts, front-back and left-right, were used by signers from each cohort in their narratives. The two cohorts did not differ in their use of frontback spatial relations overall (β = −0*.*47, *Z* = −0*.*67, *p* = 0*.*50), but did differ significantly in their use of left-right distinctions (β = 3*.*60, *Z* = 4*.*69, *p <* 0*.*001). In other words, signers from the two cohorts did not differ in how often they used space to assign locations to referents overall, nor did they differ in their use of front-back spatial relations when taking on the perspective of a character in the event (locating the other character in the space in front of them), but they did differ in their use of diagrammatic space (locating the narrator outside the event as an observer) and their use of left-right spatial relations for their referents.

Finally, we analyzed the frequency and type of referential shift devices used in the narratives. The data were submitted to a logistic mixed effects regression with item (video) and subject as random effects, and use of a specific referential shift device was assigned a 1 and the absence of that referential shift device was assigned a 0. Second-cohort signers used referential shift devices to explicitly mark a shift in perspective in significantly more narratives than did first-cohort signers (see **Table 4** for means and standard deviations, β = 3*.*17, *Z* = 2*.*75, *p <* 0*.*01). Crucially, we observed a difference between the two cohorts in how consistent

**Table 4 | Proportion of narratives that included each referential shift device, by each cohort.**

*Standard deviations given in parentheses.*

they were as a group in marking referential shift. Five first-cohort signers used referential shift devices in at least five of the six narratives, while the remaining three first-cohort signers used them in three or fewer narratives, that is, half the time or less. In contrast, nine of the 10 second cohort signers in our study used referential shift devices in at least five narratives, and the remaining second-cohort participant used them in four of the six narratives.

In investigating the types of devices used to mark referential shift, we found that second-cohort signers used significantly more spatial devices (β = 3*.*38, *Z* = 5*.*57, *p <* 0*.*001) but not more lexical devices (β = 0*.*36, *Z* = 0*.*76, *p* = 0*.*45) than first-cohort signers. There was no significant difference between cohorts in the use of neutral lexical labels as a device (β = 0*.*58, *Z* = 1*.*46, *p* = 0*.*14) nor point-to-chest (β = −0*.*75, *Z* = −0*.*36, *p* = 0*.*72). We next looked at whether there were cohort differences in the use of the different types of spatial devices. Compared to the first-cohort signers, second-cohort signers used significantly more spatially modulated lexical signs (β = 1*.*78, *Z* = 2.79, *p <* 0*.*01), indexical points-to-space (β = 2*.*71, *Z* = 2*.*77, *p* ≤ 0*.*01) and body shifts (β = 3*.*96, *Z* = 4*.*05, *p <* 0*.*001).

# **DISCUSSION**

The recent emergence of a sign language in Nicaragua offers us the opportunity to capture the creation and development of new grammatical devices. We followed the emergence of referential shift devices over the first two sequential age cohorts of NSL, paying particular attention to the degree to which signers leveraged the iconic use of space for this function. There are reasons to expect referential shift to take advantage of spatial iconicity from the outset. Spatial devices for referential shift have been found in many mature sign languages, and may turn out to be a sign language universal. Furthermore, if a sign language already incorporates highly embodied, iconic representations within constructed action to depict the behaviors of characters in a narrative, it seems a natural first step to refer to the relative spatial locations of those characters to mark a shift in perspective from one character to another.

We observed that both the first and second cohorts of signers of NSL easily represented multiple characters' perspectives, readily switched back and forth among these perspectives, and did not differ in the number of character perspectives represented in their narratives. Previous work has documented delays in false-belief understanding in first-cohort signers (Pyers and Senghas, 2009), which had made us sensitive to the possibility that first-cohort signers might not effectively represent the different perspectives within a story. We found, however, that this was not the case; members of both cohorts, with equal frequency, encoded and represented the different characters' roles in their narratives.

Where the cohorts differed was in the use of devices to explicitly mark the shift from one perspective to another. This grammatical marking of referential shift was significantly greater in the second cohort. Both cohorts expressed perspective change using referential shift devices at least some of the time, suggesting that the seeds for linguistic marking of perspective emerged early in the language. However, the first cohort was both less frequent and more variable in their marking than the second. While three of the eight first-cohort signers marked referential shifts in half or fewer of their narratives, it was rare for a second-cohort signer to perform a shift without explicitly marking it. The consistency observed across the second-cohort participants suggests that over the late 1980s, while they were still young, NSL became increasingly stable in the marking of perspective changes in a narrative.

Where referential shift did appear in the signing of the first cohort, it was primarily as a non-spatial, lexical device; spatial marking, though present, was used far less. In contrast, secondcohort signers used spatial devices significantly more than the first-cohort signers did. This pattern of findings suggests that the use of space to mark referential shift was somewhat slow to emerge, relative to lexical devices.

The later emergence of spatial devices to grammatically mark referential shift does not appear to be due to the lack of a productive use of spatial layouts in general, throughout the language. Signers from both cohorts used the signing space in a concrete, iconic way to assign spatial locations to referents, along both the front-to-back and left-to-right axes, in about half of their narratives. This frequency suggests that both kinds of layouts, and the explicit use of the three-dimensional signing space, have been available since the earliest years of NSL. As we move from the first to the second cohort, the assignment of referents to locations to the left and right increased. Interestingly, we did not see a similar increase in the use of the front-to-back axis. Evidently, as the language matured, the balance between the two layouts changed, favoring differentiation along the left-to-right axis, at least for this function.

Along with the change in spatial layout, we observed changes in the nature of the spatial format applied in the narratives. Both cohorts readily described events using a character's perspective, even multiple characters' perspectives, in viewer space. That is, signers from both cohorts adopted the perspective of a character within their constructed action utterances. However, the use of diagrammatic space to frame the event from the perspective of an outsider, here the narrator, increased across cohorts, occurring in less than a quarter of the first cohort's and about half of the second cohort's narratives. We suggest that these changes the increase in the use of differentiation along the left-to-right axis, and the increase in the use of diagrammatic space to structure the narrative—follow from other changes in the language, specifically, (1) the establishment of conventions for conveying left-right spatial contrasts (*to the left of*, *to the right of*) and (2) the development of more complex story structures, framed at the level of a third-person narrator.

# **THE EMERGENCE OF LEFT-RIGHT SPATIAL CONTRASTS**

Despite its apparent iconicity, the use of space to the left and right of a signer to convey the concept of physical spatial contrasts, such as *left of* and *right of,* is not automatic or transparent, and was not available at the outset of NSL. Descriptions of left-right relations are grounded in real-world space, and the mapping from real-world-space to signing-space can be ambiguous. Left-right contrasts present a particular challenge, because they fall along an axis of symmetry—the left side of the body is symmetrical to the right side—and because perspective differs from one persons' viewpoint to another. This combination makes them more subject to ambiguity than up-down and front-back contrasts. The convention in ASL and many other mature sign languages is that left-right spatial contrasts are typically described from the viewpoint of the signer (Emmorey, 1996; Pyers et al., 2008). Previous work on NSL has shown that second-cohort signers introduced consistency in the use of spatial language, systematically marking left-right spatial relationships, and linguistically distinguishing among contrastive locations within the signing space. The older, first-cohort signers do use the signing space to describe spatial relationships, but do not do so systematically, resulting in ambiguous spatial descriptions (Pyers et al., 2010). Specifically, first-cohort signers might use the same spatial locations to describe objects to their left as for objects to their right, while second-cohort signers would use distinct locations to the left and right side of the signing space to convey the relative locations of objects to the left and right side in the real world. Evidently this spatial contrast took some time to develop in NSL, and did not conventionalize until the first cohort had already reached adolescence. Once the language had established conventions for left-right spatial contrasts in descriptions of physical space, signers readily applied this distinction in devices marking abstract reference. In that sense, the spatial referential shift devices developed quickly.

#### **THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NARRATOR WITHIN THE NARRATIVE**

Conventions at the level of discourse structure similarly took some time to emerge, and did not necessarily arise automatically once more local devices for sentence structure were available. In related work on the emergence of NSL, the use of devices for building discourse cohesion increased as the language was passed from the first to the second cohort. These developments included an increase in the range and frequency of devices for explicitly marking grammatical subjects (Coppola et al., 2013) and the development of anaphoric uses of pointing (Coppola and Senghas, 2010). Consequently, signers could manage narratives more explicitly at a meta-level, introducing and referring back to characters unambiguously. The introduction and maintenance of characters within a story is often performed at the discourse level of the narrator, across sentences. Increasing grammatical specificity at the local level (e.g., distinguishing subjects and objects) likely enabled more complex narrative structure, which in turn created a context in which any referential devices needed to be applied consistently to effectively maintain reference in longer utterances, including across sentence boundaries. That is, the development of more complex narratives may have created pressure to express multiple distinct perspectives unambiguously, and to explicitly distinguish the narrator's perspective from the characters' perspectives in a story. Lexical and spatial devices being used to disambiguate reference might have then been taken up as grammatical markers of referential shift.

# **SIMILARITIES TO OTHER EMERGENT SYSTEMS**

Work on the development of verb agreement in Israeli Sign Language (ISL), a language around 75 years old, shows a similar pattern of a shift from use of front-back space to left-right space as the language develops (Meir, 2012). The earliest inflected forms of agreeing verbs in ISL are produced on the front-back axis, where the argument is associated with a spatial locus in front of the signer, and the directionality of the sign moves from the signer's body to the locus. In later forms, arguments are associated with spatial locations to the left or right of the signer, and inflected signs are produced along a left-right axis, originating from the signer's body or a spatial location off the body and ending at the locus associated with the object or recipient argument.

In contrast, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), an emergent village sign language that is approximately the same age as ISL, has not yet developed ways of using space in this grammatical way, and lacks a spatial verb agreement system (Meir et al., 2007). This later, or absent, grammatical use of the signing space may be indicative of differences between deaf community sign languages, like ISN and NSL, and village sign languages like ABSL (see Meir et al., 2010). Village sign languages typically have a smaller number of deaf members—in this case, ABSL has about a tenth the number of deaf members as NSL—with a correspondingly higher degree of shared information (Sandler et al., 2005). The resulting greater intimacy within the community may put less functional pressure on the language to make the kinds of grammatical distinctions we document in NSL. We would predict that any future development of a grammatical use of space in ABSL would include viewer-space perspective and front-back contrasts emerging first, and diagrammatic-space perspective and left-right contrasts appearing later.

Note that the changes we explore here do not represent a simple increase or decrease in spatial iconicity, but rather, a change in the nature of the spatial mappings that different grammatical devices exploit. We can identify two types of iconicity in use, which map on to different aspects of events. The first type, which includes enactment, depicts the actions of agents from the agent's own perspective. The second type, which includes diagrammaticspace depictions and spatial body shifts, depicts the actions and locations of agents from a narrator's perspective. These two types of iconicity use mutually incompatible mappings. For example, through enactment, a signer can faithfully replicate the behaviors of the referent, using the movement of the signer's body to represent movement of a referent's body. But when the signer moves the body to indicate a shift of reference, that body movement no longer maps to the movement of the referent's body. There is no corresponding movement, by any referent, that occurs in the actual event. The first type of iconicity, enactment, is highly effective in portraying the actions of a single character, but is limited in its capacity to depict other components of an event, such as other referents and their actions. Conversely, spatial iconicity captures the relationship among the components of the event. Once you have both types of iconic representations in use in a language, grammatical devices are necessary to effectively switch back and forth between the two.

### **PARALLELS TO ACQUISITION**

In some ways, the developments we have documented in the emergence of NSL parallel the acquisition of language by children. Previous research has found that a consistent and effective use of spatial contrast develops relatively late in native-signing children's acquisition of mature sign languages (Schick, 1990). Children acquiring ASL are able to express the perspective of another character starting from age three, but initially do so using direct quotation and constructed action within embodied representations, in which the signer's body represents the body of the referent character. At about 5 years of age, native signers are able to establish and use consistent spatial locations for co-reference and verb agreement (Loew, 1984; Lillo-Martin, 1991). It is not until 7–10 years of age that signers fully master anaphoric and other "long-distance" uses of space, applying spatial loci consistently across a set of utterances to produce cohesive narratives (van Hoek et al., 1987, 1989; Bellugi et al., 1990; Emmorey, 2002). Though the use of space is clearly a fundamental aspect of mature sign languages, utilizing signing space to encode and maintain reference throughout a narrative is a complex and late-developing skill.

The development of the narrative skill required to express a narrator's perspective and that of multiple characters is similarly gradual and relatively late. Switching among these perspectives requires both cognitive maturity and linguistic skill, and children acquiring spoken language typically master it only in the middle-school years (Berman and Slobin, 1994). This protracted development may inform why, along with their overall less frequent use of referential shift devices, first-cohort signers frequently produce narratives situated from the perspective of a character, using first-person embodiment devices, rather than structuring the story from a narrator's perspective, even though the narrator perspective most closely resembles their own.

As we consider these parallels between sign language acquisition and emergence, it appears that a primary, or more basic representation of perspective is generated within an embodied, viewer-space format, with spatial contrasts along the front-toback axis. Yet most, if not all, mature sign languages actively use a diagrammatic format, and use contrasts along the left-to-right axis. These conventions clearly are taking hold in NSL; indeed, by the second cohort, the left-to-right axis has become the preferred one for spatial contrasts. Why might a language change in this way? If we may speculate, the left-to-right axis might offer advantages in perceptual salience that enable signers to better exploit the three-dimensional signing space. Signing space is used for a variety of grammatical functions, such as verb agreement, anaphora, and other types of co-indexation, which utilize nonmanual as well as manual sign elements to identify particular locations near the signer's body. Signers can associate locations with particular referents, and then use pointing, eye gaze, and subtle movements of the head or torso relative to those locations to refer back to those referents (Thompson et al., 2006). Discriminating between less overt markers such as eye gaze and body movements may be easier with contrastive locations along the left-to-right axis than locations along the front-to-back axis. In other words, a glance to the left may be easier to discriminate from neutral eye-gaze than a glance forward. Moreover, the physical signing space is wider left-to-right than it is long frontto-back, allowing for a greater number of distinct locations. Since a signer cannot easily refer to locations behind the back, the use of the front-to-back axis realistically offers only one location in contrast to the signer's body. Thus, the left-to-right axis allows for more contrastive locations that are more easily distinguished.

Despite these advantages, there is a cost in adopting the leftto-right axis for spatial contrasts. Because movements to the left and right are symmetrical, they may be more difficult to encode or remember. Research in spatial cognition has found that people can differentiate and recall contrasts along asymmetrical axes, such as up vs. down and front vs. back, better than symmetrical ones like left vs. right (Franklin and Tversky, 1990; Bryant et al., 1992). Furthermore, the contrast between left and right depends on perspective. When talking about the location of nonjointly viewed locations in physical space, the signer's right can correspond to the listener's (or a character's) left. This ambiguity may explain why it takes time for a community to converge on conventions that use symmetrical relations for contrasts in reference.

Our examination of the emergence of referential shift devices in NSL has revealed that grammatical conventions for indicating shifts in perspective emerged over two sequential age cohorts of signers, who learned the language in its first two decades. The first cohort had a fair amount of variability in their production, but even so, their narratives already contained the seeds of lexical and spatial elements that would become more frequent, and possibly obligatory, in the language of the second cohort. Spatial devices appear to have emerged more slowly, but have recently become as prevalent as non-spatial, lexical devices. Previous work on NSL shows that second- but not first-cohort signers use consistent spatial language for other functions, and that the use of space to systematically assign semantic roles to the arguments of verbs emerged only with the second cohort. Spatial referential shift devices may have emerged later because they depend on the establishment of fundamental spatial conventions in the language. We conjecture that the systematic use of spatial devices in more local environments, such as within phrases and sentences, allowed them to be repurposed at the discourse level. Thus, while the modality of sign languages can ultimately engender the syntactic use of three-dimensional space, we propose that a language must first develop consistent and systematic local spatial contrasts before harnessing space for long-distance, abstract grammatical functions. The consistent use of spatial language and the grammatical use of space for shifting reference did not spring up unaided in first-cohort signers. Rather, the second cohort of signers, as children, built upon the achievements of the first. In this way, two sequential age cohorts of children transformed Nicaraguan signing from its gestural seeds to the full, complex language it is today.

# **REFERENCES**

*Society of Linguistics Workshop on Gestures: a Comparison of Signed and Spoken Languages* (Bamberg).

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 16 January 2014; accepted: 12 December 2014; published online: 09 January 2015.*

*Citation: Kocab A, Pyers J and Senghas A (2015) Referential shift in Nicaraguan Sign Language: a transition from lexical to spatial devices. Front. Psychol. 5:1540. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01540*

*This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2015 Kocab, Pyers and Senghas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# The emergence of embedded structure: insights from Kafr Qasem Sign Language

#### *Itamar Kastner 1, Irit Meir 2 \*, Wendy Sandler 3 and Svetlana Dachkovsky3*

*1 Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY, USA*

*2 Department of Hebrew Language and Department of Communication Disorders, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel*

*3 Department of English Language and Literature, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel*

#### *Edited by:*

*Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago, USA*

#### *Reviewed by:*

*Bencie Woll, University College London, UK Ray Jackendoff, Tufts University, USA Roland Pfau, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands*

#### *\*Correspondence:*

*Irit Meir, Department of Hebrew Language and Department of Communication Disorders, University of Haifa, Eshkol Tower Building, Haifa 31905, Israel e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
This paper introduces data from Kafr Qasem Sign Language (KQSL), an as-yet undescribed sign language, and identifies the earliest indications of embedding in this young language. Using semantic and prosodic criteria, we identify predicates that form a constituent with a noun, functionally modifying it. We analyze these structures as instances of embedded predicates, exhibiting what can be regarded as very early stages in the development of subordinate constructions, and argue that these structures may bear directly on questions about the development of embedding and subordination in language in general. Deutscher (2009) argues persuasively that nominalization of a verb is the first step—and the crucial step—toward syntactic embedding. It has also been suggested that prosodic marking may precede syntactic marking of embedding (Mithun, 2009). However, the relevant data from the stage at which embedding first emerges have not previously been available. KQSL might be the missing piece of the puzzle: a language in which a noun can be modified by an additional predicate, forming a proposition within a proposition, sustained entirely by prosodic means.

**Keywords: sign language, prosody, embedding, syntax, nominalization**

# **INTRODUCTION**

If a woman sits on a sofa and a man shows her a picture, can we say that *the man is showing the seated woman a picture*? We can in English and in many spoken languages; the participle *seated* allows us to express a secondary predicate which is subordinate to the main clause. As we started to investigate an as-yet undocumented young sign language from the town of Kafr Qasem in Israel we noticed an unexpected moderate tendency to use secondary predicates as noun modifiers. We regard this phenomenon as embedding, and situate it within two contexts. The first context is the overall emergence of structure in Kafr Qasem Sign Language (KQSL). The second is the question of how embedding and subordination may have evolved in natural language in general, over the ages. The latter is still a mystery for the most part, since we do not have documentation of early enough stages in the life of a language. The rise of embedding in KQSL, caught at a relatively early stage of development, could provide a clue to the initial stages of this phenomenon, and shed some light on the rise of syntactic complexity in general.

Since this is the first published work on KQSL, we begin by introducing the language, focusing on relevant historical and social aspects. We report on a brief study verifying that KQSL is not related to other sign languages in the region. We then describe our methods. The following sentence presents the results and analysis of the structures which we regard as embedded. The embedding findings arose while eliciting sentences for an investigation of word order, and we touch on this to put our main finding in perspective. To put this issue into a historical perspective, in Section Discussion: Embedding by Hand and by Mouth we compare possible origins of embedding that have been proposed for spoken languages with the KQSL findings. We summarize our findings and their theoretical relevance in the conclusion.

# **KAFR QASEM SIGN LANGUAGE**

Sign languages arise spontaneously in communities of deaf people, and are not related to (though are possibly influenced by) the ambient spoken languages. In some countries, signers have by and large converged upon a single sign language, used by the deaf population throughout the country. Thus, deaf people in America use American Sign Language (ASL), while deaf people in Britain use British Sign Language (BSL), two mutually unintelligible languages. In Israel, the established language of the deaf community of about 10,000 signers is Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Yet Israel is home to a number of other sign languages which have arisen there over the past century, languages used by smaller, sometimes insular communities with an unusually high percentage of congenital deafness. Such languages are termed *village sign languages* (Meir et al., 2010; Nyst, 2012; Zeshan and de Vos, 2012) present other terms used in the literature to refer to these communities). Two village sign languages have already been documented in Israel. In the Bedouin village of Al-Sayyid, a community of about 4000 members of whom 130 are deaf, a sign language arose about 80 years ago (Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, ABSL), and, for more than a decade, has been the focus of intensive anthropological (Kisch, 2000, 2007, 2012) and linguistic investigation (e.g., Sandler et al., 2005; Aronoff et al., 2008; Meir et al., 2013; Sandler et al., in press). In the Jewish community of the sub-Saharan town of Ghardaia, Algeria, another sign language emerged (Algerian Jewish Sign Language, AJSL). When the community members left Algeria and immigrated to Israel and France, they brought the sign language with them and continue to use it to this day (Lanesman and Meir, 2012a,b). To the list of sign languages being investigated in Israel, we now add KQSL.

The town of Kafr Qasem lies in the so-called Triangle area of Arab towns in central Israel and has existed for 350 years. Of its 20,000 residents, approximately 100 are deaf. From reports and interviews with residents of the town we estimate that the language is four generations old. Our team has been in touch with the local deaf community since early 2010, gathering social and historical data and analyzing the language's phonology, lexicon and syntax. This work has led us to conclude that KQSL is an independent language, worthy of study both for its own sake and in comparison to other languages. We give the results of a lexico-statistical study supporting this view, after providing some historical context.

# **HISTORY AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT**

From what we have been able to uncover, an 80-year-old woman is the oldest living signer of KQSL. She is known to have had deaf aunts and uncles, placing our estimate for the age of the language at just under 100 years. Until the 1960s, the number of deaf people in the village was about 12. A rapid increase in the general population resulted in an increase in the number of deaf individuals, numbering about 30 by 1980, and over 100 today (Meyad Sarsur, pers. commun. 2013).

We do not possess detailed records of the deaf population over the last century. The history of the local community, gathered through interviews with people in the community, is as follows. A deaf woman from the south of the country married a hearing man from the village over 100 years ago, later giving birth to a number of deaf children. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s there were 1800 inhabitants in the village, out of whom 12 were deaf (7 male, 5 female). By the early 1980s the number reached 31 (14 male, 17 female). The rise in the number of deaf children led to the opening of a class for deaf children in the local school in 1979. Although the first teacher was a non-signer, in 1985 a teacher who used signing started working in school, introducing ISL vocabulary into the educational system there. Since 1993, cochlear implants have been available through the Israeli health system; around 30 children have been implanted. According to one of our deaf consultants, the parents of these children "reject the use of sign language." A number of parents of deaf children founded a local association in 1995, paving the way for a deaf club for afternoon activities with sign language which opened in 1996. Today the town has a number of educational programs available for deaf children: a local branch of *MICHA*, the Israeli preschool system for young deaf children; Learning Centers; a kindergarten; elementary school classes in the nearby town of Jaljulia; and classes for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the local junior high and high school.

From our interviews with deaf and hearing people who are 60 years and older, we have learned that the older deaf people in the village spent a lot of time with each other as a group in their childhood. They have a sense of "togetherness" that has persisted to this day. There are many social meetings held at the house of one of the older women which serves as the local gathering place for deaf people of all ages, situated on a street nicknamed "the deaf neighborhood." Some of the deaf people are married, usually to a hearing spouse, though there is at least one deaf-deaf marriage in the younger generation. The hearing spouses, siblings, children and neighbors of deaf people communicate with them in sign. Hearing people that we interviewed report that this has been the practice for as long as they remember, which goes back about 60–70 years. Since contact with the Jewish deaf community and the general educational system for the deaf in Israel began around the late 1970s, we assume that the sign language that emerged in the village up to that point developed independently of ISL. We have found no evidence of contact with the better studied village sign language in Israel, ABSL, over the years. This is not surprising, due to geographical and cultural distances between the two. Even today, contact between people from the two communities is very rare. We therefore conclude that KQSL developed as an independent local sign language. This conclusion is corroborated by the lexical comparative study reported below.

However, deaf people in Kafr Qasem who entered the educational system in the 1980s and onwards have been heavily influenced by ISL, and many of them find it hard to understand the older people who use only KQSL. In order to document and describe the linguistic structure of KQSL, it is necessary to study the language of those signers who have had little contact with ISL over the years, and who use KQSL regularly as their main means of communication. The study reported here is based on the sign production of six such KQSL signers.

# **EVIDENCE FOR KQSL AS AN INDEPENDENT LANGUAGE**

One clear indication that two languages are unrelated is the existence of two different lexicons. In fact, one of our first impressions of KQSL was that its vocabulary is unlike that of ISL or ABSL, and we therefore had to be aided by an interpreter to interact with signers there. In the KQSL lexicon, we have found signs for tangible objects, abstract concepts, actions and feelings. Many of these are directly related to the local culture. For instance, KQSL has two signs for the concept *sheep*, each referring to a different type of sheep, a distinction important for a community that used to engage in herding. The lexicon also includes signs that can be regarded as function words, such as negators, signs denoting quantity and signs denoting degree.

In order to determine the degree of overlap between KQSL and the neighboring sign languages, we follow previous work in comparing the lexicons of sign languages and their dialects (McKee and Kennedy, 2000; Guerra Currie et al., 2002; Hendriks, 2008; Al-Fityani and Padden, 2010). The methodology is based on comparing the relative resemblance between signs in different languages that denote the same concept. To this end we require definitions of what *identical* signs and what *similar* signs are, and so a word on sign language phonology is in order.

Contrastive features in established sign languages are hierarchically organized into a number of major phonological categories: handshape, location and movement (see Sandler, 2012 for an overview). Although there is some debate regarding the status of palm orientation in the system, i.e., whether it is a fourth major category or subordinate to handshape (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006, p. 156), this theoretical point is not of great import here; features of orientation are clearly distinctive in sign languages, and this suffices for our purposes. That these categories contain contrastive features can be readily seen through examination of minimal pairs, using ISL as an example. In ISL, the signs DEPRIVED and PROFIT (**Figure 1A**) are distinguished by

features of the two handshapes and This is a minimal pair, because the locations and movements are the same in the two signs, which are distinguished by handshape alone. The ISL signs WELL-BEING and CURIOSITY (**Figure 1B**) are minimally distinguished by features of location (chest vs. nose respectively), while ESCAPE and BETRAY are distinguished by movement alone, straight for ESCAPE, and arc for BETRAY (**Figure 1C**).

These phonological features are used when comparing the lexicons of different sign languages in order to determine the degree of overlap between them. Following McKee and Kennedy (2000, p. 51), we define *identical* as signs which are pronounced with the same handshape, location, movement and orientation. *Similar* signs differ in only one of these parameters. Comparing ISL with KQSL signs, we find a few signs in the two languages that are identical; they share all four components, as is illustrated by the sign for "bird" in **Figure 2A**. The signs for "television" (**Figure 2B**) are similar; they have the same handshape, location and movement, but differ in orientation. The signs for "cow" (**Figure 2**C) are different; they differ on more than one phonological component. They have a different handshape and a different movement.

Even sign languages that we know to be genetically unrelated might display substantial similarities in vocabulary. Previous work has shown that unrelated sign languages normally display between 20 and 30% overlap in their lexicons (McKee and Kennedy, 2000). For example, ASL shares 26.3 and 24.5% identical signs with two languages which are genetically related to each other but not to ASL itself, namely BSL and Australian Sign Language, respectively. Including similar signs in the tally raises the rates to 32.6 and 32.7% (McKee and Kennedy, 2000, p. 53).

Guerra Currie et al. (2002, p. 228) obtained similarity ratings of 38% in 112 sign pairs when comparing the distantly related Mexican Sign Language and French Sign Language; 33%

similarity in 89 pairs between the culturally linked, but not genetically related, Mexican Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language; and 23% similarity in 166 pairs between the unrelated Mexican Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language.

This state of affairs, in which unrelated sign languages show such similarities, is attributed to iconicity, pervasive in the sign language lexicon. Two signs denoting the same concept in two different languages may represent iconically the same aspect of the concept being described. In such cases, they will display similarity in form, whether or not the two languages are related. For example, a sign for "eat" might represent food going into the mouth. In this sign, the location of the sign will be the mouth and the hand will move toward the mouth. The shape of the hand might vary from language to language, as it does in ISL and ABSL for example, shown in **Figure 3**. According to McKee and Kennedy's criteria, these two signs are *similar*. However, this similarity does not necessarily reflect a genetic relationship between the two languages. Even when the features of all four parameters are identical in two sign languages, as they are for EAT in ISL and in ASL, one would not wish to use this coincidence as evidence for proximity on a sign language family tree. The two signs may be identical because they are built on the same mental image representing the concept. It is for this reason that a percentage as high as 30% similarity between the lexicons of two sign languages should not be interpreted as reflecting a family relationship. In contrast, British, New Zealand, and Australian Sign Languages are very closely related, with 82% identical signs from a Swadesh list, and 98% similar signs (McKee and Kennedy, 2000; Johnston, 2003).

Returning to our comparison of KQSL, ISL, and ABSL, we have been using an adapted Swadesh list of concepts for comparison of different dialects and signers (we added a number of concepts that are likely to exist in all sign languages of the region, such as "Jerusalem"; the list is given in Supplementary Materials). Using this list we conducted three pairwise comparisons of elicited citation forms between ISL, KQSL, and ABSL. Coding was done by the first author and checked by the second author and two deaf consultants. Cases of disagreement were discussed until a consensus was arrived at. We compared 161 pairs of signs that exist as lexical signs in both KQSL and ABSL, finding a 19% overlap in identical signs which rose to 36% when similar signs were

included. The overlap is similar when comparing KQSL and ISL: of the 186 pairs of signs that exist in both languages, 15% show overlap when considering identical signs and 36% overlap when including similar signs. The comparison of 161 pairs of signs in ABSL and ISL showed lesser degree of overlap: about 9% overlap with identical signs and 23% overlap when similar signs are included. The results of this comparison are given in **Figure 4**.

This suggests that, from a lexico-statistical point of view, KQSL and ISL are no more related than ASL and BSL are to one another (31% identical in the latter case). In spite of cultural similarities between the communities of KQSL and ABSL, their lexicons show a very similar degree of overlap. In some cases, similarity or identity between pairs of signs in these two languages may be partly due to some shared aspects of their culture, which are represented iconically by their vocabulary. For example, signs for "man" in KQSL and ABSL take the moustache to be the distinguishing feature of a man. This is a typical characteristic of men in Arab communities in the region, and is reflected in the choice of the mental image underlying the signs in both languages. In ISL, as in many European based sign languages including ASL, the sign for "man" is articulated on the forehead, maybe iconically representing a cap. The sign for "sheep" in ISL represents a wooly body, while the KQSL and ABSL signs represent the wobbly tail of the sheep, a very noticeable feature if you are a shepherd walking behind your herd (see **Figure 5**). Though the two signs are different, they might be regarded as similar since they differ only in orientation: in ABSL the fingertips are oriented downwards whereas in KQSL the fingertips point forward. Yet their similar form may reflect shared cultural practices rather than linguistic affiliation.

In spite of shared cultural practices and iconicity, the lexicons of KQSL and ABSL are different in about 65% of the items in our list, as are the lexicons of KQSL and ISL. From interviews with people in the Kafr Qasem and Al-Sayyid communities we learned that contact between members of the communities has been very rare and sporadic, and contact between deaf ISL signers

**ABSL.**

and the older members of the KQSL deaf community has also been limited. Since the lexicons are different and the historical and social backgrounds are different, it seems reasonable to conclude that these are different languages with potentially different grammatical characteristics. Next we turn to the details of our study.

# **METHODS**

# **PARTICIPANTS**

Six native KQSL signers participated in the study, five deaf and one hearing. The participants were of the 2nd and 3rd generation of Kafr Qasem deaf, with ages ranging between 42 and 67 (*M* = 52.7), four female and two male. Our group included one father-daughter pair. The results come from two of the female participants and one of the male participants. All participants received an explanation in sign language (ISL, which was then translated to KQSL by a member of the community) about the goals of the research and the methodological procedure. Only those participants who gave their consent to participate were included in the study.

# **MATERIALS**

We used 30 short clips originally compiled for Sandler et al. (2005). The elicitation material included 13 intransitive sentences, 13 monotransitive sentences and four ditransitive sentences (the list is given in Supplementary Materials). Of the monotransitive sentences, eight portrayed a person acting on an object (e.g., a man washing a plate) and five portrayed an interaction between two humans (e.g., a girl combing a woman's hair). All four ditransitive sentences had two animate participants (e.g., a woman handing a shirt to a man).

# **PROCEDURE**

Participants viewed these video clips on a laptop, one clip at a time, and then described them in sign language to another native signer seated across from them. The interlocutor was asked to choose one of three pictures portraying the scene on a printed page, in order to verify comprehension. For example, if the video showed a woman giving a shirt to a man, the page included a picture of a woman giving a man a shirt, a picture of a man giving a woman a shirt and a picture of a woman looking at a man. If an incorrect picture was chosen, the signer was asked to produce the sentence again. Some of the subjects signed the same sentence more than once of their own accord. Conditions were pseudo-randomized in advance, creating two lists with different item orders, so that each participant was shown the stimuli in one of two orders.

### **PROSODIC ANALYSIS**

The elicited material underwent a preliminary gloss by a deaf research assistant, a native signer of ISL who has been in contact with KQSL signers for a number of years. Next, a quadrilingual consultant (KQSL, ISL, Arabic, and Hebrew) watched all elicited utterances and was recorded translating each one into Hebrew. This consultant, a trained ISL interpreter, is fluent in Arabic, KQSL, ISL, and Hebrew but was more comfortable volunteering simultaneous translations into Hebrew than sign-by-sign glosses. The preliminary glosses were compared to the translations provided, at which point the authors then discussed the best way to gloss each sign. Once agreement was reached, the gloss for each utterance was checked with the consultant once more to reach the final version reported here. Data were glossed and coded using the ELAN annotation system, which also provides the time windows for each annotation, allowing us to measure sign duration1 .

The elicitation and glossing procedures were designed to analyze basic clause structure in KQSL, particularly word order. However, the first step toward defining clause structure is to define clause boundaries. In a language that has not been previously studied, this is not a trivial matter, since there is no pre-existing information regarding properties of clauses in the language. A dilemma regarding parsing of a stretch of discourse into clauses immediately arises when two signs denoting actions occur in the same response, as in: MAN SIT GET-UP. How should this stretch of signs be analyzed? As a coordination of two clauses, e.g., "the man sat down and then stood up," or maybe as one clause containing a main predicate and a secondary

1The ELAN tool was developed at the Language Archive, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (http://tla*.*mpi*.*nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/). See Crasborn and Sloetjes (2008) for a discussion of the use of ELAN to code sign language data.

predicate, as in "the seated man (the man who was sitting) stood up"? Since we do not know anything about clause structure in the language, the initial analysis cannot be based on syntactic properties. In such cases we found that prosodic cues are very helpful.

In previous analyses of clause structure in unstudied sign languages (ABSL, Sandler et al., 2005; Padden et al., 2010) and ISL (Meir, 2010), a method was developed for determining clause boundaries based on the semantics and the prosody of the signs. Semantically, a clause is a unit containing a predicate, and associated signs are determined by thematic roles associated with the predicate. Prosodic cues, such as shifts in the rhythm marked by a pause or lowering of the hands, together with a change in head or body position, determine the boundaries of an intonational phrase, which often corresponds to a clause (Nespor and Vogel, 1986). Furthermore, prosodic cues also mark constituents within a clause, which often correspond to smaller syntactic constituents such as phrases.

The prosodic analysis employed here relies on the model of sign language prosody developed in Sandler and colleagues' work mainly on ISL (Nespor and Sandler, 1999; Dachkovsky and Sandler, 2009; Sandler, 2011; Dachkovsky et al., 2013). The prosodic cues in the list below were used as indicators of constituent boundaries, in accord with criteria developed in earlier work. These cues include manual timing and certain non-manual markers. These cues are typically combined at major prosodic constituent boundaries, i.e., intonational phrases. Specifically, increasing the salience of the final sign in a constituent through lengthening, holding the hands in place, or repeating the sign is accompanied by and aligned with a concomitant shift in head position and change of facial expression (Dachkovsky and Sandler, 2009; Dachkovsky et al., 2013). Smaller constituent boundaries (e.g., phonological or intermediate phrase boundaries) may be similarly marked by changes in hand rhythm and facial expression, but typically not by change in head or body position. Duration is increased at final prosodic constituent boundaries (Nespor and Sandler, 1999). An exception is constituent-final pronouns, which can cliticize onto their preceding hosts, and be observably reduced in duration (Sandler, 1999). Similar criteria have been used for determining constituent boundaries in previous work on ABSL (Sandler et al., 2005, 2011; Padden et al., 2010). The earlier literature does not provide measures of the duration of signs other than the final signs within constituents, a measure which we have found to be useful for the phenomenon under discussion in KQSL. Of the cues reported in the literature, the following are relevant for the present study:

(Boyes Braem, 1999 for Swiss German Sign Language, Fenlon et al., 2007 for Swedish Sign Language and BSL, Nicodemus, 2009 for ASL, Herrmann, 2009 for German Sign Language, Jantunen, 2007 for Finnish Sign Language, Van der Kooij et al., 2006 for Sign Language of the Netherlands, and see Ormel and Crasborn, 2012 for an overview).

# **RESULTS**

Here we report the word order results briefly, and go on to provide a detailed analysis of the embedded structure we found in our data.

# **WORD ORDER**

In total, 213 elicited utterances were recorded. Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) is the predominant order, occurring in over 63% of the responses, as in (1). OSV and SVO follow up with 19 and 14%, as in (2) and (3) respectively. We may conclude that SOV is the prevalent word order in KQSL. The remaining 4% are divided between less frequent orders such as SV, OV, and OVS (4); for a more detailed analysis of word order in KQSL compared to other languages see Meir et al. (in preparation)4 .

2For differences prosodic uses of head movement in ISL and ASL, see Dachkovsky et al. (2013).

3Unlike the other criteria that we used, which are all supported in detail by earlier research, facial expression spread from a specific word has not been employed in earlier work and requires further confirmation. However, the criterion is lent credence by its similarity to another previously supported phenomenon: the mouthing of spoken words in ISL, which spreads from the specific sign it accompanies to neighboring signs within small prosodic units (Sandler, 1999).

4The emergence of a prevalent word order does not mean that all clauses in KQSL contain a straightforward arrangement of subject, object and verb. See examples (16) and (17) below for utterances in which some arguments or predicates are repeated.

# **EMBEDDING**

# *Identifying an embedded predicate*

Out of the 213 responses, 10 presented us with a challenge: they contained two predicates (two signs denoting an action or a property), yet the two signs seemed to differ in both their function in the string and in their prosody. We begin with an in-depth analysis of a representative utterance. Consider the following stretch of signs, describing a clip in which a man and a woman are sitting on the sofa, and the woman is looking at the man:5

#### (5) WOMAN MAN SIT EYE∧LOOK-AT++. 6 (1.1.04)

The considerations we describe here were the same for each of the 10 examples analyzed. The first dilemma was whether the sign SIT is predicated of both the woman and the man ("the woman and the man are sitting"), or whether it is predicated only of the man. Prosodic cues provided the answer.

After the sign WOMAN, whose movement lasted about 400 ms, there was a hold in the movement of the hands (that is, the hands were held still at the final location of the sign) for about 250 ms. The end of the sign and the duration of the hold were aligned with a shift in both torso and head positions, the two bobbing slightly down and back up. This combination of features is typical of a prosodic boundary.

In contrast to this, there was no major postural change between MAN and SIT. More importantly, there was no hold of the hands or pause after the sign MAN; rather, the signer immediately transitioned to the beginning of the following sign, SIT. Instead, both the body posture and the behavior of the non-dominant hand linked MAN and SIT within a single prosodic constituent. First, a change in head and body posture after WOMAN characterized the two signs MAN SIT. The sign SIT is often accompanied by an upward movement of head and torso. In example (5), this upward posture of the torso starts on MAN, spreading regressively from SIT to MAN. Additionally, the non-dominant hand, which is not used in the sign MAN but comes into use in SIT, starts moving upwards toward the initial location of SIT while the dominant hand still signs MAN. This process of Non-dominant Hand Spread within (but, crucially, not beyond) phonological phrases has been described for ISL and compared with external sandhi phenomena that take place within prosodic constituents (Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Nespor and Sandler, 1999).

The overall effect is one of a smooth transition between MAN and SIT, as opposed to a marked break between WOMAN and MAN. In other words, the prosodic pause between the sign WOMAN and the sign MAN, and the assimilatory hand and body movement between MAN and SIT, indicate that MAN SIT is a constituent, to the exclusion of WOMAN (in **Figure 7** below, the relevant head and body postures are indicated with dotted lines). It is thus unlikely that SIT modifies both WOMAN and MAN ("a woman and a man are sitting"), but very likely that it modifies MAN. In still illustrations, the effects we describe appear quite subtle, but the movement of the body in actual signing makes both spreading and changes of postures more salient.

Next we examined the prosody of the transition from SIT to the following sign, EYE∧LOOK-AT. Here we see a break between the two signs, characterized by a change in head posture and body posture (head and body tilt to the left), dropping of the nondominant hand, which was active in the sign SIT, before the sign EYE∧LOOK-AT, and a change in rhythm: EYE∧LOOK-AT is slower. However, there is no pause or hold between the two signs, making the boundary less prominent than an intonational phrase boundary which typically delineates clauses (Nespor and Sandler, 1999), and we therefore do not interpret it as corresponding to a clause boundary.

What then is the structure of this utterance? The first two prosodic constituents are the two arguments of the transitive event: WOMAN and MAN. The last constituent is the predicate (EYE∧LOOK-AT). The order of constituents corresponds to the prevalent order in the language: it is SOV. However, we were baffled about how to analyze the verb SIT that formed a prosodic unit with MAN, and did not itself mark the end of the clause. We then noticed that SIT was much shorter in duration than the sentencefinal verb, LOOK-AT, and much smaller in size. Let us make these measures explicit.

We use the term *shorter* signs to refer to the total duration (in milliseconds) of the sign production. We define the beginning of a sign as the point when the hands are fully in the handshape and orientation of that sign. The sign ends when they are no longer in that configuration. In the example above, SIT lasted 170 ms whereas LOOK-AT lasted 400 ms. In a subsequent utterance (6), the same sign, SIT, lasted 490 ms, showing that it is not the sign itself which is short but rather the specific production in sentence (5) above.

(6) WOMAN SIT. ONE∧GIRL SMALL BRUSH++. (1.1.22) 'A woman is sitting. A girl is brushing her hair.'

When we say *smaller* signs, we refer to the amount of physical space "taken up" by the sign. This measure is more difficult to quantify, yet when a sign occurs in two responses, the size of the sign in the two productions can be compared. We illustrate this with the verb SIT. In response (6), the two hands begin at chest level and are lowered to the hips, with each hand starting off with the palm faced outwards and the pinky finger near the ipsilateral shoulder (see **Figure 6A**). In example (5) above, however, the situation was slightly different. The dominant hand started off at chest level, while the non-dominant hand was a bit below it, such that the tips of the fingers in the non-dominant hand were in line with the palm of the dominant hand. The hands then moved slightly downwards, stopping just under the chest (see **Figure 6B**).

5Following convention, we use small caps to denote glosses of individual signs. The caret ∧ is used to denote compounding. Multiple plus signs ++ denote repetition. A hyphen indicates that two words in the gloss correspond to one sign. For example, the two words LOOK-AT correspond to one sign in KQSL. Full stops indicate clausal intonation break, and commas indicate minor intonational breaks, that is, intonational breaks within a clause. Square brackets [ ] delimit the prosodic constituents whose position and length are relevant for our analysis, as described in the text. Some signs have different versions (synonyms), and these are glossed as e.g. WOMAN1 WOMAN2. IX denotes an index (pointing in space). Each utterance is followed by its identifier in our database. Where relevant, sign duration in milliseconds is given as a subscript. 6The sign LOOK-AT is signed with a pointing sign towards the eye and then a V hand moving outwards. They form one lexical unit, "look-at."

These two measures—shortened sign duration and reduced sign size—combine to give us a notion of phonological reduction. Taken together, the phonological reduction and the prosodic cues on and between WOMAN, MAN, SIT, and LOOK-AT indicate that in this production, SIT does not behave as a main predicate in a clause: it forms one constituent with the preceding sign MAN, to the exclusion of the sign WOMAN; there is a break between SIT and LOOK-AT, signaled by change in head and body posture and change in rhythm, but it is not a typical major boundary, as there is no hold or pause between the two signs; and SIT is much shorter than the other verbal sign in the clause, LOOK-AT. The full prosodic analysis of this clause is presented in **Figure 7** below7 . "Duration" notes the total length of each sign in milliseconds, "Hold" indicates that the hands were held in position at the end of a sign, and "Big" means that the size of the sign takes up more physical space than the citation form. As pointed out above, we take the prosody to signal syntactic constituency as well, and we therefore analyze SIT as a secondary predicate in the clause, a modifier of MAN. An acceptable translation—confirmed by our consultant—would thus be "The woman is looking at the sitting (seated) man." We conclude, then, that the response in (5) is a clause containing two predicates, a main predicate and a secondary predicate. The two predicates differ in their position in the clause and in their form: the main predicate occurs in clause final position, and is longer and larger in form. The secondary predicate follows a nominal sign and forms a constituent with it and is reduced in both size and duration. The structure of the clause is as follows:

(7) [WOMAN] [[MAN SIT] [EYE∧LOOK-AT]] 'The woman is looking at the sitting (seated) man'

#### *Alternative hypotheses*

Possible objections to the proposed analysis concern the difference in size and duration between the two predicates. It might be argued that LOOK-AT is longer than SIT because it is in utterance final position, because it is verbal rather than nominal or because it is reduplicated. Let us consider these objections one by one.

Signs occurring utterance-finally tend to be longer and bigger (Nespor and Sandler, 1999). Accordingly, SIT might be shorter not because it is embedded but rather because it is not in utterance final position. But since the prevalent word order in KQSL is SOV, there should be a strong tendency for the main predicate to occur in the clause final, prosodically prominent, position. How then can we show that the short duration of what we take to be an embedded predicate is indeed a signal of embedding rather than the result of its position in the utterance? Luckily, we found at least one example where the embedded predicate is in utterance final position while the main predicate is not:

(8) MOTHER. IX MOTHER WOMAN SIT.  A girl is brushing the sitting mother's hair.'

BRUSH-OTHER and BRUSH are two variants of the "brushing" sign, with different hand orientations and locations; the former portrays a brushing action on an imaginary brushee and the latter on the signer herself. All sign durations are given for the nonreduplicated version, meaning one movement of the hands, even if the sign was reduplicated. For example, the first movement of BRUSH-OTHER in (8) took 450 ms, but in that utterance this movement was then repeated once more for a total duration of 800 ms for the entire, reduplicated sign. For the purpose of comparing main predicates and secondary predicates we calculated the duration of the main predicate without reduplication. In (8), the main verb, BRUSH-OTHER, is twice as long as the verb SIT (450 and 210 ms., respectively), though SIT is in final position and BRUSH-OTHER occurs in clause medial position. We conclude, then, that the relative duration and size of the predicate are indicative of its status as embedded or not.

The second objection concerns the status of grammatical categories in the language. It has been noted for various sign languages that nouns are reduced in size when compared to related verbs (e.g., Johnston, 2001 on Australian Sign Language; Hunger, 2006 on Austrian Sign Language; Kimmelman, 2009 on Russian Sign Language). It might be argued that SIT is shorter than LOOK-AT as it is a nominal in a modifier position and not a "real" verb. We do not know enough about the differences between nouns and verbs in KQSL to address this question. Yet examples (19) and (20) below suggest that we should be cautious in drawing such a conclusion. The sign HOUSE appears in both examples, yet in (20) it is three times longer than in (20). This difference shows that the part-of-speech status of a sign cannot be the only factor determining its duration; prosodic factors play a role too. In the absence of a detailed analysis of the properties of nouns and verbs in the language, we prefer to couch our analysis in prosodic terms, since such an analysis is not based on a syntactic analysis which we do not have. The relationship between prosodic factors and parts of speech deserves future attention as we learn more about the behavior of nouns and verbs in KQSL.

7In the videotape of the sentence illustrated in **Figure 7**, the dominant hand is beginning to transition from the handshape for MAN (fist) to the shape for SIT (flat, open hand), while still at the location for MAN, at the same time that the nondominant hand moves toward the position for SIT. The coarticulatory movement was so fast that only a blurred transitional shape was visible, and we elected to represent the handshape of the sign MAN in **Figure 7**, rather than the blurred transition, for clarity.

Third, LOOK-AT is reduplicated whereas SIT is not. Reduplication indicates aspectual marking in many sign languages (see Pfau et al., 2012 for a survey). The difference between LOOK-AT and SIT might be argued to be that of aspectual marking, that is, morphological rather than prosodic. However, in four of the 10 examples we provide below, the main predicate is not reduplicated, yet the difference in duration between the two predicates is noticeable.

We therefore attribute the difference in size and duration between the two predicates first and foremost to the difference in their prosodic positions, which are related to their constituency affiliation. Whether other factors, such as parts of speech and aspectual modulation, also play a role in differentiating between the two predicates, is an issue that we leave for future research.

# *Other instances of embedding*

As noted above, after analyzing the response in (5), we noticed in our data that such reduced predicates occur in nine additional responses, and are used by three out of the six signers. In eight of these nine cases, as in the example analyzed above, the reduced predicate forms one prosodic constituent with a preceding noun, which denotes one of the human participants in the clips (a man, a woman or a girl); that is, there is no break in any of the prosodic signals between the predicate and the preceding sign, motivating our analysis that these signs belong to one prosodic unit8. In several cases, the facial expression and/or body posture that accompany the second sign, the modifier, spread regressively to the preceding noun, strengthening the impression that the two signs form one prosodic unit. For example, in sentence (17), the signer raises her eyebrows for the sign GLASSES, but this facial expression starts on the preceding sign MAN. The result is that both signs are characterized by the same facial expression. The glosses of these 10 instances with reduced secondary predicates are provided in (9)–(18), where (12) contains two embedded predicates.

	- 'A man shows a picture to a sitting woman. She looks.'

seated and nervous, is tearing paper.'

9In this example, the embedded predicate does not form one constituent with the preceding head noun. This might be a result of the fact that the head noun is a phrase consisting of three lexical nouns (WOMAN1, WOMAN2, WOMAN 1), and the signer is a bit hesitant as to which sign of "woman" to use. The embedded predicate also consists of two signs (SIT LEGS-CROSSED).

8Example (15) below is slightly different, as explained in fn. 9.

'A woman, sitting with her legs crossed, is rolling a ball.'

'A man with glasses is putting a book in a cupboard.'

(18) [IX MAN GLASSES160], BOOK PUT-IN420. ARRANGE. PUT-IN (1.6.25b)

'A man with glasses is putting a book in. He's arranging things. He puts it in.'

We are now in a position to extend the analysis behind annotating (7) as (9) to examples (10)–(18). In all of these sentences, there are two signs that have a predicative function. But one of them is reduced in form and forms a constituent, either with a preceding nominal sign or, in the case of (12) and (15), with the following sign10. The phonological reduction is very clear. In the 10 cases, there was a marked difference between the duration of the two predicates: means of 214.8 ms for the short predicates, and 492.2 ms for the long predicates. Welch's two-tailed *t*-test suggests that this difference is robust, *t*(14*.*89) = 5*.*45, *p <* 0*.*001. The phonological reduction, together with the prosodic cues indicating that the shorter predicate forms a constituent with the preceding nominal, are taken as evidence that the two predicative signs are of different grammatical status: the unreduced predicate is the main predicate in the clause, whereas the reduced predicate is a modifier of the preceding noun, an embedded predicate.

It is important to stress that not all responses containing two signs with a predicative function were analyzed as containing an embedded predicate. Compare clause (13) above (repeated here as 19) with (20);

The two responses are almost identical in terms of the signs used. Yet their prosodic structure is different, signaling different constituent structure and consequently a difference in the function of HOUSE in the two clauses. In (19), HOUSE is very short (110 ms), it is signed with a single movement (the two hands touch each other once), and there is no hold or pause between WOMAN and HOUSE. In (20), on the other hand, HOUSE is almost three times longer, 320 ms. long. It has a double movement (the hands touch each other twice), and there is a hold on WOMAN, indicating a break between WOMAN and HOUSE. This break prevents us from interpreting HOUSE as forming a constituent with WOMAN; it forms its own prosodic constituent in the clause. Therefore, it is impossible to tell whether HOUSE modifies WOMAN or WALK-PATH, and both "the woman is walking in the house" and "the woman, in the house, is walking" are possible translations of this clause. Since there is no clear positive prosodic evidence for analyzing HOUSE as modifying WOMAN, we did not regard this response as an instance of embedding.

As these examples show, not all of the embedded predicates, that is, signs in a modifier position, are signs denoting actions or events. The signs that we found in this position are as follows: seven occurrences of stative predicates (SIT), one psych predicate (NERVOUS), one locative noun (HOUSE) and two instances of an attributive noun (GLASSES). They function as modifiers of the preceding noun, and were interpreted according to the nature of the modifier: "a sitting/seated man," "a nervous girl," "a woman in a house," "a man with glasses/a bespectacled man."

How should these predicates be analyzed? If we draw on the translations, it is tempting to analyze them as participles or reduced relative clauses: "a girl (who is) sitting," "a woman (who is) in the house," "a man (with/who has) glasses." Yet such a step is dangerous, since we are imposing the grammatical structure of one language (English) on another (KQSL). In English, participles have distinct morphological forms, and relative clauses are usually marked syntactically by a relative pronoun. In KQSL this is not the case. We have not found as yet any evidence for morphological markings that distinguish nouns from verbs, and no morphological evidence for the existence of participles. Furthermore (as is common in sign languages generally), we have not found any relativizers or other function words that mark subordination. It might be argued that the lack of evidence for such structures is due not to the simplicity in structure of the language but rather to the preliminary stage of investigation. However, studies of other village sign languages (e.g., ABSL, Aronoff et al., 2008; Padden et al., 2010, and other sign languages reported in Zeshan and de Vos, 2012) indicate that KQSL is not the exception; clear cases of syntactic manifestations of subordination have not been reported in other village sign languages. We are therefore reluctant to regard these reduced predicates as morphologically marked participles or bona fide subordinate clauses11.

However, the prosodic cues clearly show that we have clausal constructions with two predicate signs, one of which, reduced in form, occurs in a modifier position, and is perceived as secondary, that is, as modifying a referent rather than as the main predicate.

Since both constituents consist of more than one sign, they each form a separate prosodic unit. However, the sign SIT is still very short, which we take to indicate that it is not the main predicate in the clause.

10In these two examples (12 and 15), the reduced predicate itself is being modified, by NERVOUS and LEGS-CROSSED respectively. In addition, the constituent referring to the subject in these examples contains more than one sign. The prosodic break after the subject constituent might be due to the relative "heaviness" of this constituent in these examples. However, we regard these clauses as instances of embedded predicates rather than two coordinate clauses (e.g. "a woman sits cross-legged and rolls a ball") because of the clear difference in duration and size between the predicates in the clauses.

11The literature on relative clauses in established sign languages suggests that in some languages relative clauses contain function words that occur at the boundaries of relative clauses. In some sign languages these signs are optional (e.g. the sign THAT in ASL, Liddell, 1978, and a sign referred to as "relative pronoun" in Turkish Sign Language, Kubus and Rathmann, 2011). In other sign languages the use of a function word as a marker of relative clauses is reported as "systematic," though the specific details and analyses vary across languages. See Pfau and Steinbach (2005) for German Sign Language, Branchini and Donati (2009) for Italian Sign Language, and Tang et. al. (2010) for Hong Kong Sign Language.

We therefore suggest that these are cases of *embedding* of a predicate within a clause, in the very basic sense of the term. In the next section we describe a possible path of emergence for this construction, and examine its consequences for our understanding of the development of embedding in language.

# **DISCUSSION: EMBEDDING BY HAND AND BY MOUTH**

As mentioned earlier, subordination and embedding are prevalent in the languages of the world. From a functional point of view, subordinate and main clauses are construed as cognitively asymmetrical (Langacker, 1987; Cristofaro, 2003). Functional asymmetry is usually reflected in the asymmetry of the form. The dependent status of a subordinate clause is often manifested in the deranking of its predicate through the use of a predicate form that is not used in independent clauses. The predicate deranking can be realized in different ways, for example, by the use of nominal markers on dependent predicates (nominalization), or through the lack of formal distinctions characteristic of independent predicates (Stassen, 1985; Croft, 1991; Cristofaro, 2003).

Diachronic studies show that subordinate structures often originate from simpler structures. Deutscher (2000), for example, traces the emergence of subordinate clauses in Akkadian, documenting the transition from parataxis of two adjacent clauses to full embedding of one in the other. Yet the question of how this process originates has proven difficult to answer without data on novel embedding structures in a given language.

# **THE DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENT OF SUBORDINATION**

In their study of grammaticalization, Heine and Kuteva (2007) and Heine (2009) suggest that there are two main paths in which subordinate clauses arise12. The first is through a process of expansion, by reinterpreting a nominal as clausal. The second is by integration of two independent clauses into one, where one of the main clauses becomes subordinate to another. Heine (2009) notices that the first strategy usually gives rise to complement embedded clauses, while relative clauses and adverbial clauses usually arise via the second strategy, integration. Regarding the expansion process, Heine suggests that the first stage toward subordination is the appearance of a non-finite verb form (nominalization, infinitive or participle) in a nominal position in the clause. In subsequent stages, the phrases headed by a nonfinite form of the verb acquire more and more verbal properties, eventually becoming clausal.

Deutscher (2009) points out that the scenario described by Heine and Kuteva (2007) and Heine (2009), though plausible, misses a crucial point. According to Deutscher, the real syntacticcognitive feat of subordination is nominalization, the ability to derive a noun from a verb. The expansion of a nominalized verb into a clause is a secondary development, which builds on a structure that already contains subordination, at least from a cognitive point of view. As Deutscher puts it, "The ability of a language to derive a noun from a verb, that is, to reify a verbal predicate and to present it as a nominal argument or modifier, is at the core of subordination." (p. 199). While Heine takes the transition from "Stage 0," which contains only nominal constituents, to "Stage 1," which contains a nominalized verb in a constituent position, as the first step of subordination, Deutscher argues that the transition from Stage 0 to Stage 1 is what needs to be explained, since it cannot be taken for granted. For him it is this step, the appearance of a nominalized verb in a non-predicative position, that needs to be explained. Yet most accounts of the development of subordination have neglected to do so.

Deutscher then points out that in the grammaticalization literature, it is very hard to find works on the development of markers that signal V *>* N change. He attributes the difficulty of finding such grammaticalization paths to the absence of source constructions with a nominal head that takes a verb as its complement. Such constructions necessarily involve nominalization, and therefore already contain an instance of subordination. He speculates that backformation might be one route to nominalization. He considers the French suffix -*age* which was originally attached to nouns: *mari* "husband" + *age* = "the state of being a husband." The denominal noun *mariage* was then reanalyzed as being derived from the verb *marier* "to marry," rendering -*age* a nominalizing suffix that can attach to verbs.

A different approach to the development of embedded structures is offered by Mithun (2009), examining data from Mohawk. Mithun suggests that in Mohawk integration of two clauses can be done only by prosodic means, with no syntactic indication of subordination. Two clauses, one a semantic complement of the predicate of the other, or two clauses that share an argument, may occur under one intonational contour, as in example (21) below (Mithun, 2009, p. 60):

Mithun argues that the clauses in (21) are pronounced under a single prosodic contour. Within this overarching contour the pitch moves from High at the beginning of the first clause (*Tóka'*) to a full terminal fall at the end of the last clause (*kèn*:*'en*), with only partial pitch resets at the beginning of the internal prosodic phrases. She suggests that in this example one overall prosodic contour made up of small constituent sub-contours can be characterized as an instance of embedding. The author notices that the prosodic integration of the two clauses "reflects a kind of cognitive organization similar to that reflected by syntactic integration" (p. 61). That is, integration or embedding need not be reflected in the morpho-syntax; the cognitive feat of embedding is the ability to integrate two clauses in one construction. But this can be achieved by prosodic means alone in Mohawk. She further suggests that "The fact that we find prosodic structure without substantive syntactic structure suggests that prosodic structuring might, at least in some cases, precede syntactic structuring" (p. 61). Similar cases of subordination structures marked only

12The purpose of Heine (2009) is to show how devices that first served to structure independent sentences come to assume functions of subordination, and not necessarily to demonstrate the origin of subordination.

by intonation contours have been reported of other languages as well, e.g., Bambara (Bird, 1968, cited in Givón, 2012), and several languages in the Niger-Congo area (Givón, 2012).

These two approaches taken together suggest that embedding is first and foremost a cognitive operation, the integration of one proposition within another. This can be done by morphosyntactic means, such as the development of nominal forms of verbs, or by prosodic means, by uttering two clauses under the same prosodic contour. KQSL differs from the languages investigated by Deutscher and Mithun in that it has neither morpho-syntactic marking of clause integration nor of parts of speech13.

Studying the data from KQSL, we cannot claim that the secondary predicates we identified are nominal forms of verbs, since we have not discovered yet clear formal indication of parts-ofspeech categorization in the language; all we can say is that they occur in a modifier position, function as modifiers, and have a form which can be regarded as less independent than the main predicates from phonological and prosodic points of view. However, we do think that KQSL offers a unique opportunity to look at the very first stage of embedding, the steps leading from Stage 0 to 1, that is, the possible initial stages of creating a subordinate predicate. Furthermore, since the only clues for the embedded status of these predicates is prosodic, KQSL bears witness to the role that prosody plays in the emergence of embedding.

A recent study on homesign (Hunsicker and Goldin-Meadow, 2012) may provide additional evidence as to how embedded constituents might arise in a communication system. The study describes the nominal constituents in the gestures of a young homesigner they call David. While David has iconic gestures ("nouns") and pointing gestures ("determiners"), he has also been developing more complex nominal constituents comprising of both a noun and a determiner. For example, the string in (22) could be parsed and interpreted in two ways: "that is a bird and it pedals," or the monoclausal "that bird pedals."

(22) point-at-bird BIRD PEDAL

What Hunsicker and Goldin-Meadow show is that the monoclausal interpretation is more plausible, implicating the existence of embedded structure: [[point-at-bird BIRD] PEDAL]. Here is

NIN: Yup. I like them. Like this one the red.

NIN: Yup.

how the argument goes. First, they obtained the distribution of sentence lengths in David's production throughout the corpus without the sentences under examination, as measured in units (number of gestures). They then calculated two distributions of length: one with these sentences as "flat" structures, where each gesture corresponds to exactly one unit. In this case [[pointat-bird] [BIRD] [PEDAL]] would have three units. The other distribution was calculated with the hypothesized hierarchical structure, where [[point-at-bird BIRD] PEDAL] has two units. They found that the distribution with embedded structures provided a better fit to the data, leading them to conclude that the structures they investigate are to be seen as complex nominal constituents.

This case is remarkable since—as the authors discuss at length—David did not receive any structured hierarchical input from his caregivers. That he nevertheless developed embedded structure is in accordance with our findings as well; he managed to "squeeze" extra information into what was originally a basic nominal. One question that arises is how this was accomplished. We have provided evidence here that prosody is the resource used by KQSL signers to create embedded structure. Prosody is clearly co-opted in David's case as well: "Motoric criteria were also used to determine the end of a string of gestures and thus sentence boundaries. Two gestures were considered separate sentences if the child paused or relaxed his hands between the gestures. Gestures that were not separated by pause or relaxation of the hands were considered part of the same sentence." (Hunsicker and Goldin-Meadow, 2012, p. 736). The authors do not provide a prosodic analysis, and it is wise to be cautious about attaching labels such as "prosody" to generalizations about rate of signing in the homesign system of a young child. However, research on sign languages leads us to expect timing breaks in particular places. For example, consider example (23), adapted from (6b) in Hunsicker and Goldin-Meadow (2012, p. 743). If David's production is sensitive to factors such as signing rate and cognitive complexity of constituents, we would predict a short prosodic break between LONG and *point-downstairs*.

(23) [[point-at-self point-at-paddle LONG] point-downstairs] 'my long paddle is there'

In sum, it might be possible that what regulates the length of sentences and constituents in David's system reflects the emergence of a prosodic system, which in turn enables hierarchical structures that may lead to embedding. Naturally, more work is required in order to substantiate this claim, in village sign languages as well as in homesign.

#### **KQSL: A ROUTE TOWARD EMBEDDING**

The structure in question—a clause containing a secondary predicate—appears to be a new phenomenon in KQSL, not just because of its limited frequency but also in light of the fact that 9 of the 10 instances documented were produced by the two younger signers in our pool, those aged 42 and 44. Labov (1972) famously discussed the notion of "apparent time": in the study of language variation and change, when two age groups vary on one sociolinguistic variable, it is likely that the older group