Research seminar: Benjamin Anible, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Title: No such thing as a fish: Differing morphosyntactic integration of expressive forms in Norwegian Sign Language.
Illustration: Benjamin Anible
Abstract
In this talk, I investigate how variation in semiotic expressiveness patterns with morphosyntactic integration in Norwegian Sign Language (NTS).
Linguistic signs may be iconic; depicting or mimicking the actual properties of referents (Haiman 1980, Ohala 1994, Perniss et al. 2010). Ideophones – a class of marked words that depict sensory imagery (Dingemanse 2012, Haiman 2018) – found in some spoken languages do just this. The Siwu ideophone “gblogblogblo”, directly refers to the sound of bubbling.
In signed languages, depiction is pervasive, given the affordances of the hands and face for direct visual representation (Wilcox 2004), and the same concept can be represented descriptively or depictively.
The NTS sign SØVE (“sleep”), can be used descriptively, or can be modified to depict an actual instance of sleeping as SØVE draws on the actual positioning of the hands when sleeping (Ferrara & Halvorsen 2017). Greater expressivity, i.e. more demonstrative depiction, correlates with lower morphosyntactic integration in Japanese ideophones and is reported in other languages (Dingemanse & Akita 2017, hereafter D&A).
Ideophones, that are more foregrounded intonationally and phonationally and show more expressive morphology, are likely to appear more to the left of the following hierarchy: quotative > collocate > predicate.
Given this finding, we ask: What is the modality-generalisability of D&A’s claim? Does this pattern hold for systems with greater potential for depiction? We take on these questions using data from the NTS corpus (Ferrara 2025).
We identified 10 pairs of frequent concepts used both descriptively and depictively. Descriptive forms are primarily identified by their resemblance to citation forms as specified in the NTS lexical database and secondarily by mouth patterns matching Norwegian words (Vogt-Svendsen 1981, Ferrara 2025).
We identified depictive forms as an iconic departure from the descriptive form. We coded concept terms as 2 quotative, collocational, or predicative. We additionally operationalised intonational foregrounding as evidence of character viewpoint (Engberg Pedersen 2015), phonational foregrounding as distance and speed moved by the head and hands measured by computer vision (Jantunen, et. al. 2020, Vandenitte, et al. submitted), and expressive morphology as sign duration.
We expect the same pattern as D&A – that within depictive-descriptive pairs, depictive usages will appear more frequently as quotatives than collocates and predicates.
Our findings will assess the modalitygeneralisability of D&A’s claim and contribute to our understanding of expressive strategies across modalities.
The seminar is held in English, and interpreted into Swedish Sign Language.
References
Dingemanse, M. (2012). Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics
Compass, 6(10), 654–672. https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.361
Dingemanse, M., & Akita, K. (2017). An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: On the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese1.
Journal of Linguistics, 53(3), 501–532. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002222671600030X
Ferrara, L. (2025). The Norwegian Sign Language Corpus. https://osf.io/tydf4/
Haiman, J. (1980). The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation. Language, 515-540.
Haiman, J. (2018). Ideophones and the evolution of language. Cambridge University Press.
Jantunen, T., De Weerdt, D., Burger, B., & Puupponen, A. (2020). The more you move, the more action you construct: A motion capture study on head and upper-torso movements in constructed action in Finnish Sign Language narratives. Gesture, 19(1), 72–96. https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19042.jan
Ohala, J. J. (1995). The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch. Sound Symbolism, 325–347.
Perniss, P., Thompson, R. L., & Vigliocco, G. (2010). Iconicity as a general property of language: Evidence from spoken and signed languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 227.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00227
Vandenitte, S., Jantunen, T., Puupponen, A., & Anible, B. (submitted). The Kinematics of Composite Stories: A motion-capture study of manual telling sequences with varying degrees of constructed action in Finnish Sign Language narratives.
Vogt-Svendsen, M. (1981). Mouth Position & Mouth Movement in Norwegian Sign Language. Sign Language Studies, 1033(1), 363–376. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.1981.0004
Wilcox, S. (2004). Cognitive iconicity: Conceptual spaces, meaning and gesture in signed languages.
Cognitive Linguistics, 15(2), 119–47. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1515/cogl.2004.005
Last updated: 2026-02-11
Source: Department of Linguistics