Table Of ContentSign Multilingualism
Sign Language Typology
Editors
Marie Coppola, Onno Crasborn, Ulrike Zeshan
Editorial board
Sam Lutalo-Kiingi, Ronice Müller de Quadros,
Nick Palfreyman, Roland Pfau, Adam Schembri,
Gladys Tang, Erin Wilkinson, Jun Hui Yang
Volume 7
Sign
Multilingualism
Edited by
Ulrike Zeshan, Jenny Webster
ISBN 978-1-5015-1158-5
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0352-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0338-2
ISSN 2192-5186
e-ISSN 2192-5194
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952836
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin and Ishara Press, Lancaster, UK
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Contents
About this book VII
Part I
1 Forces shaping sign multilingualism
E vangelia Adamou, Onno Crasborn, Jenny Webster and
Ulrike Zeshan 1
2 R epair in cross-signing: Trouble sources, repair strategies and
communicative success
K ang-Suk Byun, Connie de Vos, Ulrike Zeshan and
Stephen Levinson 23
3 Two languages at hand – Code-switching in bilingual deaf signers
Ulrike Zeshan and Sibaji Panda 81
4 S tabilisation of the lexicon in an emerging jargon: The development of
signs to express animate referents in a sign language contact situation
Tashi Bradford, Susanne Michaelis and Ulrike Zeshan 127
5 A minimalist perspective on code blending in TİD – Turkish
bimodal bilingualism
Selçuk İşsever, Bahtiyar Makaroğlu, İclâl Ergenç and
Hasan Dikyuva 171
6 Blending languages: Bimodal bilinguals and language synthesis
R onice Müller de Quadros, Diane Lillo-Martin and
Deborah Chen Pichler 201
7 Methodological innovations in sign multilingualism research
Jenny Webster, Kang-Suk Byun, Sibaji Panda and Tashi Bradford 227
vi Contents
Part II
8 Burundi Sign Language-indian Sign Language bilinguals’
community of practice
Sibaji Panda 261
9 A community profile of “sign-speakers” at the
indore Deaf Bilingual Academy
Sibaji Panda 267
10 M icro-communities of practice: A case study of cross-signing
participants in the UK
Tashi Bradford 273
11 Micro-communities of practice: A case study of cross-signing
participants in india
Tashi Bradford 277
12 Community profile of an international group of sign language users:
Linguistic and social aspects
Kang-Suk Byun 283
Language index 293
Subject index 295
About this book
This volume shares findings and innovations from the MULTISIGN project (“Mul-
tilingual behaviour in sign language users”, European Research Council grant
agreement no. 263647). This study encompassed five years of intensive research
(2011 to 2016) and laid the groundwork for a new linguistic sub-field, Sign Mul-
tilingualism Studies. The project was led by the International Institute for Sign
Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS) at the University of Central Lancashire
in Preston, UK, in cooperation with partners in the Netherlands, Turkey, India,
Germany, and the USA. We are grateful for the European Research Council
funding that has made the MULTISIGN study and this volume possible. This
includes funding not only for MULTISIGN itself but also for the projects INTER-
ACT (ERC grant agreement 269484, awarded to Professor Stephen Levinson at the
Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) and Grammatical Universals (ERC
advanced grant 670985, awarded to Professor Martin Haspelmath at Leipzig Uni-
versity), which facilitated the contribution of two of the volume’s chapters.
MULTISIGN contributed toward establishing Sign Multilingualism Studies as
a sub-field by demonstrating the array of research questions, methodologies, and
findings that scholars can exploit in this area, and collecting large and diverse
data sets to examine sign language users’ bi- and multilingual behaviours in
various situations. The three strands of the project – cross-signing, sign-switch-
ing, and sign-speaking – have several overarching findings in common, including
the salience of metalinguistic skills and the role of social learning in communities
of practice. Moreover, the typological profile of the languages involved, sociolin-
guistic norms, individual linguistic backgrounds, and the surrounding linguistic
environments all play a role in bi- and multilingual outputs. Findings from this
project constitute the main content of this volume. By identifying the scope of
Sign Multilingualism Studies and its relationships with other areas of linguistics,
MULTISIGN paved the way for further research to be integrated into this sub-field.
In addition to sign language linguistics and bi-/multilingualism studies, the
MULTISIGN project accessed expertise from other areas of linguistics, including
psycholinguistics (Karen Emmorey, San Diego State University), formal gram-
matical theory (Selçuk İşsever, Ankara University), and pidgin and creole lin-
guistics (Susanne Michaelis, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
and Leipzig University). Moreover, we are particularly grateful to several other
colleagues who have greatly enhanced the value of this volume. Stephen Lev-
inson and Connie de Vos supervised PhD student Kang-Suk Byun at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, enabling a study on conversational repair
to be included in the volume. Evangelia Adamou (National Centre for Scien-
tific Research in France, CNRS) and Onno Crasborn (Radboud University) have
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501503528-203
viii About this book
contributed their expertise on multilingualism in spoken language and sign
language research respectively, adding valuable discussions to the introduc-
tory chapter. We also extend our special gratitude to Ronice Müller de Quadros
(Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil), Diane Lillo-Martin (University of
Connecticut), and Deborah Chen Pichler (Gallaudet University), whose vital con-
tribution has enabled us to broaden the scope of this volume to include child
language data.
This volume is structured in two main parts. Part 1 contains the main chap-
ters covering key findings and insights related to various bi- and multilingual
settings that involve sign language users. Part 2 is about five micro-communi-
ties of practice that emerged during the MULTISIGN project work described in
Part 1. Three of these communities relate to the rapid emergence of improvised
inter-languages in situations of sign language contact (i.e. cross-signing), with
communities located in the UK, India, and the Netherlands. The other two com-
munities involve hearing bimodal bilinguals in one group of research participants
(i.e. sign-speaking), and deaf signers fluent in two different sign languages in
another group (i.e. sign-switching). Most of the Part 1 chapters relate directly to
one or more chapters in Part 2, and vice versa. The chapter on bimodal bilin-
gualism in Turkish and Turkish Sign Language in Part 1 does not correspond to a
chapter in Part 2, because this group of research participants did not form a sus-
tained community of practice, coming together for data collection sessions only.
Conversely, the Indian sign-speakers’ community of practice discussed in Part 2 is
not represented in Part 1, because the findings from this research were published
separately and are not included in this volume.
The high number of deaf multilingual signers in the MULTISIGN team was
crucial for the innovative ethics of the project, deaf people’s agency in research,
and a robust empirical position. With a deaf senior researcher, two deaf research
assistants, a deaf PhD student, and a deaf technician, this project contributed
toward building research capacity among deaf communities. Various deaf par-
ticipants from Burundi, India, Germany, Indonesia, Jordan, Nepal, and Turkey
worked as fieldwork assistants and ELAN data annotators, giving them first-hand
experience of research. Some took part in dedicated capacity-building activities,
including a two-week training programme in India undertaken in conjunction
with a group of local deaf university students. These factors serve to advance
“deaf-led research”, which involves how a project operates, its agency, and its
team composition.
MULTISIGN’s impact extended into linguistics disciplines that have tended
to be dominated by spoken languages, and reached beyond academia by illumi-
nating the high-level linguistic skills of international deaf community members.
These skills were harnessed in a subsequent applied project called SIGNSPACE
About this book ix
(‘Multilingual work spaces for sign language users – An online portal driving
social innovation’, European Research Council grant number 737587). SIGNS-
PACE piloted a social innovation by translating the MULTISIGN findings into an
online portal with automated sign-to-sign translation, activities that increase
meta-linguistic awareness, and tools for setting up multilingual work spaces for
transnational groups of deaf signers to collaborate remotely. We hope to con-
tinue our work on Sign Multilingualism Studies in both theoretical and applied
contexts, and hope to inspire others to undertake further explorations in this
area of research.
