In this article, we explore the distribution of handshapes used in depicting constructions (also known as classifier predicates) representing animate referents in Swedish Sign Language (STS). Using data from the STS Corpus, the analysis is focused on factors influencing the choice of handshape with regard to the 1-handshape vs 2-handshape variants, exploring their usage in different functions and contexts. The results demonstrate patterns in how signers use specific handshapes to depict motion and location events involving human(-like) and animal referents. The findings suggest that the event type, textual context and animacy of the depicted referent influence the choice between the 1- vs 2-handshape categories in STS, and that the 2-handshape category is used far more often than the former in our data. Furthermore, some of the analysed signs seem to have a limited depicting function in certain uses, suggesting possible grammaticalisation into a general [motion + VERB] construction, expressing an action being carried out at another location. The article contributes new insights into the nuanced use of handshapes in depicting constructions in STS and describes language-specific patterns in addition to pointing out cross-linguistic similarities/differences with regard to the expression of motion and location.

We analyze sign locations in 776 signs from 16 antonym pairs across 27 sign languages to examine metaphorical mappings of emotional valence (positive vs. negative) along different spatial axes. We conduct both an automatic and a manual analysis of sign location and movement direction, to investigate cross-linguistic patterns of spatial valence contrasts. Contrary to our hypothesis, negative valence concepts are generally articulated higher up than their positive counterparts. However, when we consider movement in space, we find that although signs generally move downward over time, positive valence concepts are associated with upward movements more often than their negative counterparts. This points to a systematic pattern for vertical valence contrasts – a known metaphor across languages – iconically mapped onto physical sign articulation. We similarly, but surprisingly, find a difference in movements along the sagittal axis, such that outward movement is associated with positive valence concepts more often than negative.

In this paper, we describe how we are actively using the Swedish Sign Language (SSL) community in collecting and documenting signs and lexical variation for our language resources, particularly the online Swedish Sign Language Dictionary (SSLD). Apart from using the SSL Corpus as a source of input for new signs and lexical variation in the SSLD, we also involve the community in two ways: first, we interact with SSL signers directly at various venues, collecting signs and judgments about signs; second, we discuss sign usage, lexical variation, and sign formation with SSL signers on social media, particularly through a Facebook group in which we both actively engage in and monitor discussions about SSL. Through these channels, we are able to get direct feedback on our language documentation work and improve on what has become the main lexicographic resource for SSL. We describe the process of simultaneously using corpus data, judgment and elicitation data, and crowdsourcing and discussion groups for enhancing the SSLD, and give examples of findings pertaining to lexical variation resulting from this work.

The idea of transitivity as a scalar phenomenon is well known (e.g., Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). However, as with most areas of linguistic study, it has been almost exclusively studied with a focus on spoken languages. A rare exception to this is Kimmelman (2016), who investigates transitivity in Russian Sign Language (RSL) on the basis of corpus data. Kimmelman attempts to establish a transitivity prominence hierarchy of RSL verbs, and compares this ranking to the verb meanings found in the ValPal database (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Bradley 2013). He arrives at the conclusion that using the frequency of overt objects in corpus data is a successful measure of transitivity prominence, and that the prominence ranking of RSL verbs correlate with that found for spoken languages in Haspelmath (2015). In this paper, we expand on these intra- and cross-modal comparisons of transitivity prominence by introducing four other sign languages to the sample: Finnish Sign Language (FinSL), Swedish Sign Language (SSL), Sign Language to the Netherlands (NGT), and German Sign Language (DGS). FinSL and SSL are known to be historically related (cf. Bergman & Engberg-Pedersen 2010), while the other are not related, which allows us to look at both modality and relatedness effects in our sample. Of the 80 core verb meanings in the ValPal database, Kimmelman (2016) included the 25 most frequent verbs in his corpus. For our study, we have annotated all occurrences of these 25 verb meanings in a subset of the corpora of FinSL (2h 40min; 18,446 tokens), SSL (2h 5min; 16,724 tokens), NGT (≈80,000 tokens), and DGS (≈58,000 tokens). We annotate whether a verb occurs with an overt object as well as the type of object (direct, indirect, clausal, or a locative). Looking at the ValPal verb meanings with ≥5 sign tokens in all four new languages, we arrive at 12 verbs that are found in all five sign languages and the spoken languages (SpL) of the ValPal database – see Table 1. In Table 1, we see that there is a general agreement across languages – both signed and spoken – in how transitivity prominent a verb meaning is. Spearman’s rank correlation shows a significant (p<0.05) correlation between all possible pairs except SSL–SpL (p=0.091) and SSL– RSL (p=0.074), corroborating Kimmelman’s finding that there are patterns of transitivity prominence present across languages and modalities. It is interesting that SSL thus diverges from the other sign languages in this sample: this deserves further investigation. We also wanted to investigate the transitivity prominence as a property of individual languages. In order to do so, we took the individual languages of the ValPal database and measured each verb meaning in each language with regard to its transitivity prominence. This meant calculating how many of the verb forms associated with a specific verb meaning took a P argument. Note that this is quite different from calculating transitivity prominence based on corpus data: with corpora, we calculated the proportion of verbal tokens occurring with an overt object, and with the ValPal database, we calculated the proportion of transitive verb associated with a particular concept. We included the 12 verb meanings found across all languages (the five sign languages and 33 spoken languages). We then calculated mean distances across verb meanings and languages, and plotted this with multidimensional scaling in Figure 1. In the figure, we see that the five sign languages form a part of a cluster, suggesting either modality-based similarities, or similarities that come with the difference in data (corpus data rather than lexical data). On the other hand, sign languages as a group are not clearly opposed to spoken languages as a group, which implies that the corpus-based and lexical calculations of transitivity are comparable. Interestingly, FinSL and SSL are not more strongly associated than the other sign languages, which implies that their historical relatedness is not directly relevant to transitivity. In our presentation, we will present the results and the conclusions in more detail, as well as discuss the possibilities of using corpus data to establish valency patterns for languages in the signed modality.

We use automatic processing of 120,000 sign videos in 31 different sign languages to show a cross-linguistic pattern for two types of iconic form–meaning relationships in the visual modality. First, we demonstrate that the degree of inherent plurality of concepts, based on individual ratings by non-signers, strongly correlates with the number of hands used in the sign forms encoding the same concepts across sign languages. Second, we show that certain concepts are iconically articulated around specific parts of the body, as predicted by the associational intuitions by non-signers. The implications of our results are both theoretical and methodological. With regard to theoretical implications, we corroborate previous research by demonstrating and quantifying, using a much larger material than previously available, the iconic nature of languages in the visual modality. As for the methodological implications, we show how automatic methods are, in fact, useful for performing large-scale analysis of sign language data, to a high level of accuracy, as indicated by our manual error analysis.

In this paper we apply methodology presented in Kimmelman (2016) and investigate the transitivityprominence of verbs in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). Specifically,we ask how similar or different FinSL and SSL verbs are in terms of their transitivity prominence,and how the transitivity prominence of FinSL and SSL verbs compares with that of verbs inother languages. The term transitivity prominence refers to the relative frequency with which a verboccurs with an object. Haspelmath (2015) has shown that in spoken languages, verbs form a rankedcontinuum between those that are highly transitivity prominent and those that occur with no objectat all. Recently, Kimmelman (2016) has argued that Haspelmath's ranking applies also to the verbsof Russian Sign Language (RSL).Our investigation is based on annotated corpus data comprising narratives, conversations andpresentations. For FinSL, we use material from 20 signers (2h 40min, 18446 sign tokens) and forSSL from 28 signers (1h 54min, 15186 sign tokens). From this data, we identified 18 verb lexemeswhich all have enough tokens and which are all comparable between languages. In FinSL, the totalnumber of verb tokens is 745 and in SSL the corresponding number is 579. All the verbs were annotatedfor overt direct and indirect objects and for overt clausal complements. The annotation workwas carried out by different annotators following common guidelines.Concerning the results, our data suggests that there are clear similarities in what verbs rankhighest (e.g. GIVE, TAKE) and what lowest (e.g. HAPPY, COLD) in terms of their transitivity prominencein FinSL and SSL. On the basis of Haspelmath (2015) and Kimmelman (2016), these are thesame verbs that are ranked highest and lowest also in spoken languages and in RSL (Table 1).However, the data also shows that certain verbs (e.g. SEARCH, TALK, PLAY) may differ considerablyin the position they occupy in the ranking. Although some of these differences can be assumed to betrue differences between languages, we suspect that some may, despite our best efforts, be traceableback to issues relating to the type of data as well as to the way the samples were formed and objectsannotated. In our presentation, we will present the results of our comparative study and discuss thedata and methodology-related issues in more detail.

In this paper, we describe a method for mapping the phonological feature location of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) signs to the meanings in the Swedish semantic dictionary SALDO. By doing so, we observe clear differences in the distribution of meanings associated with different locations on the body. The prominence of certain locations for specific meanings clearly point to iconic mappings between form and meaning in the lexicon of SSL, which pinpoints modalityspecific properties of the visual modality.

In this dissertation, I investigate various aspects of object marking and how these manifest themselves in the signed modality. The main focus is on Swedish Sign Language (SSL), the national sign language of Sweden, which is the topic of investigation in all five studies. Two of the studies adopt a comparative perspective, including other sign languages as well. The studies comprise a range of data, including corpus data, elicited production, and acceptability judgments, and combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the analyses.

The dissertation begins with an overview of the topics of valency, argument structure, and object marking, primarily from a spoken language perspective. Here, the interactions between semantics and morphosyntax are presented from a typological perspective, introducing differential object marking as a key concept. With regard to signed language, object marking is discussed in terms of both verbal and nominal strategies.

Verbal strategies of object marking among sign languages include directional verbs, object handshape classifiers, and embodied perspective in signing. The first study investigates the use of directionality and object handshapes as object marking strategies in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), and SSL. It is shown that the strategies generally display different alignments in terms of the types of objects targeted, which is uniform across languages, but that directionality is much more marginal in ABSL than in the other two languages. Also, we see that there is a connection between object marking strategies and the animacy of the object, and that the strategies, object animacy, and word order preferences interact. In the second and third studies, SSL is investigated with regard to the transitive–reflexive distinction. Here, we see that there are interactional effects between object handshapes and the perspective taken by the signer. This points to intricate iconic motivations of combining and structuring complex verb sequences, such as giving preference to agent focusing structures (e.g., agent perspective and handling handshapes). Furthermore, the use of space is identified as a crucial strategy for reference tracking, especially when expressing semantically transitive events.

Nominal strategies include object pronouns and derivations of the sign PERSON. The fourth study provides a detailed account of the object pronoun OBJPRO in SSL, which is the first in-depth description of this sign. It is found that the sign is in widespread use in SSL, often corresponds closely to object pronouns of spoken Swedish, and is argued to be grammaticalized from the lexical sign PERSON. In the final study, the possible existence of object pronouns in other sign languages is investigated by using a sample of 24 languages. This analysis reveals that the feature is found mostly in the Nordic countries, suggesting areal contact phenomena. However, the study also shows that there are a number of derivations of PERSON, such as reflexive pronouns, agreement auxiliaries, and case markers. The use of PERSON as a source of grammaticalization for these functions is attributed to both semantic and phonological properties of the sign.

This dissertation is unique in that it is dedicated to the topic of object marking in the signed modality. It brings a variety of perspectives and methods together in order to investigate the domain of object marking, cross-linguistically and cross-modally.