The visual-gestural modality and beyond

John Benjamins Publishing Company

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The visual-gestural modality and beyond Mouthings as a language contact phenomenon in Irish Sign Language Susanne Mohr

Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany

The article analyses cross-modal language contact between signed and spoken languages with special reference to the Irish Deaf community. This is exemplified by an examination of the phenomenon of mouthings in Irish Sign Language including its origins, dynamics, forms and functions. Initially, the setup of language contact with respect to Deaf communities and the sociolinguistics of the Irish Deaf community are discussed, and in the main part the article analyses elicited data in the form of personal stories by twelve native signers from the Republic of Ireland. The major aim of the investigation is to determine whether mouthings are yet fully integrated into ISL and if so, whether this integration has ultimately caused language change. Finally, it is asked whether traditional sociolinguistic frameworks of language contact can actually tackle issues of crossmodal language contact occurring between signed and spoken languages. Keywords: Non-manuals, mouthing, language contact, cross-modality, bilingualism, Irish Sign Language

1. Introduction While the sociolinguistics of sign languages was only a minor topic at the beginning of sign language research, in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century, researchers became more interested in the interplay of Deaf social life and the sign languages of the deaf. So far, the focus of research in the area has been on language contact between signed and spoken languages. This issue proves most intriguing due to modality differences of languages from the visual-gestural and the oral-aural modality. However, Berent (2004) mentions that this is also the reason why these language contact situations remain “largely unexplored”. Moreover, the factor of modality differences leads to very unique language contact phenomena Sign Language & Linguistics 15:2 (2012), 185–211. doi 10.1075/sll.15.2.01moh issn 1387–9316 / e-issn 1569–996x © John Benjamins Publishing Company

186 Susanne Mohr

that sometimes cannot be captured by spoken language theories of sociolinguistics (Lucas 2001). Especially the different temporal sequencing of languages from two different modalities is hard to analyse in a spoken language sociolinguistic framework. This article is concerned with the language contact situation between Irish Sign Language (ISL) and spoken English in the Republic of Ireland. The focus is on the language contact phenomenon of mouthing that involves the simultaneous temporal sequencing of linguistic material mentioned above. The issue will be discussed with special reference to sign-spoken language bilingualism and recent changes in Deaf communities. In order to achieve this aim, the article starts with an outline of language contact situations and sign-spoken language bilingualism in Deaf communities in Section 2. Section 3 provides a short sketch of ISL and its sociolinguistic situation. In Section 4, the analysis of the ISL data is conducted and results are discussed. Section 5 summarises conclusions that can be drawn from the examination of the data. 2. Language contact and Deaf communities

Bilinguals by definition are complex (Grosjean 1997)

Although primary sign languages are defined as the native languages of deaf communities around the world, their status within the larger hearing community of a country is usually very low. Sign languages are mostly minority languages, as the incidence of congenital deafness is approximately 1 in 2,000 (Woll et al. 2001).1 Moreover, sign languages can be considered heterogeneous minority languages due to the high degree of variation usually found (Plaza Pust 2005; Grosjean 2008). For all minority languages, the issue of traditional transmission is crucial for their status. In the case of sign languages, this point is even more critical than in most spoken minority languages, as only 5% of all deaf children are born to deaf parents and thus acquire a sign language as their L1 from them. However, the better accessibility of the visual-gestural modality for deaf people usually establishes a sign language as their native language, the restricted accessibility of the spoken language leaving them with L2-like or “L1.5” (Berent 2004) spoken language 1. Village communities with an unusually high incidence of genetic deafness are an exception from this rule; for instance, the community that used to live on Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Cape Cod in the United States in the 19th century, a Yucatec Mayan village in Mexico, the village of Desa Kolok in Bali, Indonesia, and the village of Adamorobe in Ghana. For further information the reader is referred to Ann (2001) and Nyst (2007, 2012).

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

The visual-gestural modality and beyond 187

competence. Bilingualism usually being represented as a continuum from monolingualism to unequal mastery of two languages to totally balanced bilingualism, it may involve “semilingualism” (Berent 2004; Plaza Pust 2005) at the lower end in Deaf communities. Given that for deaf people, signed and spoken language are rarely at parity (Ann 2001; Berent 2004; Plaza Pust 2005), it is also noteworthy that language contact between the (minority) signed and the (majority) spoken language in most communities is “sustained and overwhelming” (Ann 2001: 33). Therefore, Deaf people have to be bilingual in their native sign language and the surrounding spoken language, a monolingual Deaf community being impossible and nonexistent (Boyes Braem 2001). Nevertheless, they are rarely balanced bilinguals (Baker & Van den Bogaerde 2008). As explained earlier, most deaf children do not acquire sign language naturally from their parents. Hence, deaf (residential) schools play a very important role for sign language acquisition or transmission and Deaf culture. Woll and Ladd (2003) mention them as one of the two cornerstones of Deaf culture. Deaf school is usually the first place where children get into contact with sign language, Deaf culture and Deaf adult role models (Woll & Ladd 2003). Educational policies, like the oralist policy prevalent in deaf education in Western deaf societies during much of the 20th century, have had a major impact on sign languages with respect to their form and use. Woll and Ladd (2003: 151) even describe oralist education policies which prohibited deaf pupils to use sign language at school after the Milan Congress of 1880, as resulting in “community boundaries becoming cultural battlegrounds”. As becomes clear, deaf schools and educational policies directly influence the forms of bilingualism displayed by deaf people. Schooling and educational policies have had a major impact on sign language in Ireland and on the phenomenon of mouthings treated in this article as will be shown in Sections 3 and 4. Finally, it should be mentioned that despite the fact that Deaf clubs are claimed to be the second cornerstone of Deaf communities (Woll & Ladd 2003), socialising patterns of especially middle-aged and young Deaf people have changed radically within the last 30 years. There has been a general shift from Deaf clubs to more public settings (at least in Europe), so much so that Deaf clubs feel threatened (Woll & Ladd 2003). For the language contact situation between signed and spoken languages, this entails an even greater possibility of influence of spoken language on sign language and a high chance of drastic change (Turner 1995). The analysis provided here will give first insights into the implications of these changes in Ireland. Another crucial issue for the language contact situation between signed and spoken languages was already mentioned in the introduction, namely the modality difference between the visual-gestural and the oral-aural modality. These © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

188 Susanne Mohr

differences have been described in numerous articles on sociolinguistics of sign languages in general, code-switching or mixing, bi- and multilingualism or language attitudes (e.g. Ann 2001; Boyes Braem 2001; Lucas 2001; Woll et al. 2001; Woll & Ladd 2003; Berent 2004; Emmorey et al. 2005; Plaza Pust 2005; Baker & Van den Bogaerde 2008; Bank et al. 2011). This modality difference leads to a unique temporal sequencing of the linguistic material in these contact phenomena: simultaneous sequencing. The unique contact situation in signed-spoken language contact may provide unique insights into the organisation of language on two different temporal scales (Plaza Pust 2005). The components and products of language contact are tremendously complex as a result of cross-modality and bimodal bilingualism (Berent 2004; Grosjean 2008). Contact phenomena range from language shifts, switches and the integration of loan vocabulary, to language change on the diachronic level (Plaza Pust 2005). Hence, there are contact phenomena such as initialised signs, fingerspellings2 and mouthings on the lexical level, as well as code-switching and code-mixing on a broader discourse level. After Emmorey et al. (2005) it is assumed that deaf people rarely code-switch, as this would entail a complete switch into the other language, being the spoken language in this case. This, however, is usually not possible, as the oral-aural modality of spoken languages is not fully accessible to deaf people. Thus, language contact phenomena in signed-spoken language contact situations are termed code-mixing or code-blending. Further, clearly determining the exact boundaries between individual phenomena such as borrowings and loanwords is sometimes not easily feasible (Boyes Braem 2001). Regarding the phenomenon of mouthings, there is a typology of mouth actions that is generally assumed (e.g. Ann 2001; Boyes Braem 2001; Boyes Braem & Sutton-Spence 2001; Ebbinghaus & Heßmann 2001; Crasborn et al. 2008; Bank et al. 2011), distinguishing mouth actions into two different types. The first type, mouth gestures, is considered to be sign language inherent and to have no relation whatsoever with the surrounding spoken language. An example of this is the mouth gesture “shhhhh” accompanying the sign haben (‘have’) in German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache = DGS). The other type of mouth actions, mouthings, is derived from the surrounding spoken language as the word “woman” being uttered alongside the ISL sign woman. In language contact studies, we are exclusively concerned with the latter type. To date, mouthings remain a rather controversial topic in sign linguistics. Opinions reach from mouthings being mere performance phenomena (e.g. Hohenberger & Happ 2001), to being code-switches or borrowings from the 2. Initialised signs and fingerspellings are controversial with respect to language contact, as they result from contact between a signed language and the orthography of a spoken language.



spoken language (e.g. Boyes Braem 2001; Sutton-Spence & Woll 2006; Nadolske & Rosenstock 2007), or to being equivalent to manual signs as part of a multidimensional communication system (Ebbinghaus & Heßmann 2001). Bank et al. (2011: 251) describe the opinions as a continuum ranging from mouthings as outcomes of online code-blending on the one end to mouthings as fully lexicalised items in the lexicon of a sign language on the other end. Given that the functions and the status of mouthings vary between individual sign languages and consequently could not be determined universally so far, these differences are not surprising. While mouthings seem to be a marginal phenomenon in sign languages like ASL, they are much more frequent especially in European sign languages with a strong oral tradition, such as DGS. The importance and integration of mouthings in these languages is reflected by signers’ attitudes towards the phenomenon: “[…] many Swiss deaf signers often report that they couldn’t imagine their sign language without mouthings […]” (Boyes Braem 2001: 126). However, it is also true that Deaf people seem to be aware of the spoken language being the source of mouthings and try to emancipate themselves from this influence: “[…] If we sign with mouthings, the hearing people think — look there, sign language doesn’t exist without mouthing, […] We want to show with sign language without mouthing that it’s […] not dependent on [the spoken language].” (Boyes Braem 2001: 128). The lack of unity in attitudes towards the phenomenon in Deaf communities mirrors the controversy concerning the phenomenon in the sign linguistic community and is indicative of the need of further and more detailed research in this area. Some general findings on the system, functions and structure of mouthings that have been reported for a number of sign languages are summarised next. The most frequent combination of mouthings and manual signs on the formal level is a one to one alignment and semantic congruency seems to be the main principle of these pairings3 (Boyes Braem 2001; Emmorey et al. 2005; Baker & Van den Bogaerde 2008; Bank et al. 2011). Mouthings certainly fulfil lexical functions but also act as certain grammatical, prosodic and sometimes even stylistic markers in the individual sign language. Mouthings can also be used to fill lexical gaps in either the sign language itself or in an individual’s knowledge of the language. The latter seems especially important in late learners (Boyes Braem 2001). Further, if well established in a language, mouthings function to distinguish homonyms from each other (Schermer 1990; Boyes Braem 2001; Bank et al. 2011). The DGS sign pair bruder (‘brother’) and schwester (‘sister’) is an example of this. The two 3. Boyes Braem (2001) mentions that there seem to be differences between early learners (i.e. native speakers) of sign language and late learners. While semantic congruency is often given in early learners, the complete meanings of manual and mouthing rarely overlap completely in late learners.


190 Susanne Mohr

signs are phonologically identical, with the non-manual, i.e. the mouthing, being the only distinguishing parameter. The function of filling lexical gaps is closely connected with the grammatical function of derivation. Mouthings often act as a derivational element used for the creation of new lexical items (Boyes Braem 2001). These items are most frequently nominal elements (Schermer 1990; Boyes Braem 2001; Nadolske & Rosenstock 2007; Crasborn et al. 2008; Bank et al. 2011), which is in line with spoken language theory on language mixing (Poplack & Meechan 1998). On the prosodic level, mouthings act as emphasisers of lexical elements in a sentence or serve to bind syntactic elements like predicate and subject (Boyes Braem 2001; Crasborn et al. 2008). This is frequently achieved by so called “stretched” or “spread” mouthings, a phenomenon that can be compared to certain tone sandhi phenomena in spoken languages (Pfau 2005, 2009). Stylistically, mouthings are markers of what Boyes Braem (2001) calls “constructed speaking”, the imitation of spoken language as used by hearing people. This seems to be a storytelling device that has to be differentiated from reported speech. Finally, mouthings might function in order to draw attention to a certain part of a narrative (Boyes Braem 2001). After this short sketch of language contact situations in sign languages with special reference to mouthings, the sociolinguistic situation of ISL will be outlined in the following section. 3. The sociolinguistics of Irish Sign Language ISL is the native language of the approximately 6,500 deaf people living in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. However, British Sign Language (BSL) is used frequently in the latter. The exact origin of ISL is unknown as the grammar of the language is undocumented before the establishment of deaf schools in Ireland starting around 1814 (Matthews 1996). Despite the fact that ISL is Ireland’s second native language beside Irish, it still has no official status in the Irish legislation (i.e. it has no legal status in the constitution) despite resolutions by the European Parliament (e.g. 1998) and the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (2003) (Leeson 2008). Concerning the language itself, linguistic variation is a prominent characteristic of ISL. This can mostly be observed along gender lines due to traditional segregation in schooling.4 Formal deaf education in Ireland began in the 19th century, in 1814, when Dr. Charles Orpen, a medical doctor, started teaching a deaf boy 4. Regional variation in ISL has not been researched so far; however, it is assumed to be not or only minimally present within the Republic. Greater differences are expected between ISL in Northern Ireland and the Republic (Lorraine Leeson, personal communication).



from an orphanage (Matthews 19965). After the establishment of a deaf school in the Smithfield Penitentiary (Dublin) in 1816, he became head of the Claremont school in 1819. This institution was also known as the “Irish National Institution for the Deaf and Dumb”. The fact that Claremont was a Protestant co-educational school was a big concern in Catholic Ireland. Hence, in 1822, the first Catholic deaf school was established as an initiative of the Catholic Committee under Reverend McNamara. In 1845, St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls (a Catholic school for girls only) was established in Cabra (Dublin) and to date remains one of the two national schools dedicated to deaf education in Ireland. The second school, St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys (a Catholic institution for boys only), was established in Cabra (Dublin) in 1849. The strict segregation of boys and girls, who were also discouraged from mixing socially outside school (Le Master & Dwyer 1991), led to the development of distinct male and female varieties of ISL. The ISL variety of the opposite sex had to be learnt after graduation or when signers started dating signers of the opposite sex. Similar situations have been described for other sign languages, such as LSQ, the sign language used in Quebec. Although present day ISL developed from the male variety and lexical differences are only minimally visible, gender differences beyond the lexical level are prevalent (Leeson & Grehan 2004; Militzer 2009). Gender differences with respect to mouthings, the language contact phenomenon mentioned above, will be addressed in Section 4. Finally, it should be mentioned that the oralist education policy was introduced relatively late into Irish deaf education as compared to the rest of Western Europe. Moreover, it was introduced at different stages into the two schools, namely in 1946 into the girls’ school and in 1957 into the boys’ school. This also had an impact on present day ISL, as will be shown next. 4. An analysis of mouthings in ISL The present section will provide an analysis of elicited ISL data from the Signs of Ireland Corpus6 with respect to the feature mouthings. While mouthings are assumed to be derived from language contact and their frequency has been reported to increase in bilingual settings (e.g. Baker & Van den Bogaerde 2008), the current study investigates their use in a potentially monolingual setting. This refers 5. If not indicated otherwise, most information on deaf education in Ireland is taken from Matthews (1996). 6. The corpus was kindly made available by the Centre for Deaf Studies at Trinity College Dublin. The contained data is available for research purposes upon request. More information can be found in Leeson & Nolan (2008).


192 Susanne Mohr

to the concept of language mode introduced by Grosjean (2001), who defines a bilingual’s language mode as “the state of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms, at a given point in time […]”. The degree of activation of a bilingual’s languages (the base language, i.e. the bilingual’s dominant language, is always active) hence positions him/her on a continuum of modes ranging from monolingual to bilingual. Grosjean (2008) mentions that Deaf bilinguals rarely find themselves at the monolingual signing end of the continuum. Factors influencing language mode are participants, situation, form and content of the message, function of the language act and specific research factors. As will be outlined subsequently, the data collection procedure provided for a potentially monolingual setting and mode. Differences and similarities of mouthing behaviour in bilingual settings will be examined. In the first part of the section, the methodology of the analysis is described, in the second subsection the results of the study will be presented, and finally in the third subsection a discussion within a sociolinguistic framework is provided. 4.1 Method and participants The Signs of Ireland Corpus (SOI) is a corpus of ISL data consisting of self-selected personal stories, retellings of the Frog Story and data elicited using the Volterra picture task (Volterra et al. 1984), all collected by a deaf researcher in 2004. Hence, a monolingual setting, i.e. involving only native Irish signers, for data collection was provided. The corpus comprises 40 (16=male, 24=female) ISL signers aged 18–65+ from five different locations in the Republic of Ireland (Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Galway). Moreover, signers are “naïve”, i.e. ISL teachers or other individuals with a linguistic background were not included. Most signers of the corpus use ISL as their preferred language and acquired it before the age of 6. For the current study, a sample of 12 signers (6=male, 6=female) telling personal stories on various matters was selected. The main criteria for selection were the signers’ regional background (all are from Dublin) and age. This was an important issue, as the group was divided into different age groups based on whether they received little or extensive oral education at school, a potentially important factor given the mouthing behaviour of the signers. The first age group comprised signers aged 18–35, the second group signers aged 36–50 and the third group signers aged 51+. As can be seen, the age groups extended over 15 years although in common social theory, a generation spans approximately 20 years. A distinction into 20-year age groups did not prove reasonable for a sociolinguistic analysis according to age groups in the SOI, though. The different years of introduction of oralism at St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s (cf. Section 3) made the present distinction more useful in terms of an investigation of the impact of oralism on mouthing © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


behaviour. A fourth age group of signers 60+ or even 65+ would have been desirable; however, there are very few elderly signers in the corpus, and so this group would have been much smaller than the others and a balanced comparison could not have been provided. Finally, all signers are (at least) bilingual in ISL and English. The average acquisition age of ISL is 8;6 years. The table below provides an overview of the participants, their linguistic background and age group. Table 1. Linguistic background of the signers chosen for the current study Age group

Age of sign language acquisition

Language of communication with family

Caroline

1

6 years

English

Eilish

3

18 years

family signs

Fergus D.

2

2–3 years

ISL

Fergus M.

2

6 years

English, fingerspelling

Kevin

3

7 years

double handed alphabet (BSL manual alphabet)

Laurence

1

25 years

ABC, letters

Marian

3

unknown (has deaf brothers)

gestures

Michelle

2

10 years

English, gestures

Noeleen

2

12 years

English

Peter

3

7 years

family signs, written notes, BSL manual alphabet

Sarah Jane

1

birth

ISL, English

Sean

1

birth

ISL, family signs

The stories were annotated by three deaf researchers in 2004–2007 and by other researchers in subsequent years, using the ELAN software tool (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator, developed by the Max Planck Institute Nijmegen). Usually, the same person that annotated the manual signs also annotated the mouth actions. Small problems arose when reviewing the annotations for this article, due to the McGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald 1976) often described in the literature. Thus, the researchers often annotated English mouthings that they believed were present or should be there but were in fact not. In cases that showed a very obvious effect, the mouthing annotations were changed; in controversial cases, the original annotations were kept, relying on the native speakers’ linguistic competence. For the current analysis, supplementary annotations were added and the transcriptions in the tier labelled “mouthings” were split into mouthings and mouth gestures.


194 Susanne Mohr

Altogether, 26 minutes of data were analysed, i.e. 2,353 signs and 1,064 mouthings. The exact numbers of signs and mouthings analysed for the different signers can be seen in Table 2. Table 2. Number of signs and mouthings in individual signers Number of signs

Number of mouthings

Caroline

114

99 (86.8%)

Eilish

103

59 (57.3%)

Fergus D.

523

297 (56.8%)

Fergus M.

233

3 (1.3%)

Kevin

212

41 (19.3%)

Laurence

187

67 (35.8%)

Marian

294

211 (71.8%)

Michelle

227

83 (36.6%)

Noeleen

136

91 (66.9%)

Peter

160

4 (2.5%)

Sarah Jane

104

63 (60.6%)

Sean

60

46 (76.7%)

For the analysis, only manual signs were considered. Gestures that were clearly identified as not being a lexical sign of ISL were excluded from the investigation. An example of this can be seen in the following examples, where gestures are transcribed in minuscules (e.g. ‘let’s go then’ in (1) and ‘sure just leave it for now’ in (2)), while signs are represented in small capitals. (1) okay ‘let’s go then’ ‘sauntering over’ ‘thumbs up’ ‘So we said “okay, let’s go” and sauntered over [to the boy with the motorbike].’ (2) index1 index3 index1 ‘sure just leave it for now’ ‘I thought I would just leave it for now.’

Altogether, the corpus was suitable for a sociolinguistic analysis of ISL in terms of mouthings. The only issue that proved to be slightly problematic was the small number of elderly people, as an investigation of a fourth age group would have been interesting. The conclusions that could be drawn from the current data were quite clear though, so that an analysis of another age group would have been merely an added bonus. Secondly, the varying length of the personal stories proved difficult at times as comparability of signers who only provided a minute of data



and signers who signed for much longer remains problematic. Additional data from individual signers in the case of very short personal stories might have been helpful. Nevertheless, I consider the results obtained from the analysis useful as a first insight into the frequency and dynamics of mouthings in ISL. In the future, an additional examination of the Frog Story data might be considered for a more fine-grained and (thematically) more comparable analysis. 4.2 Results A first analysis of the data reveals that approximately 45% of the signers’ manual signs were combined with an English language mouthing. A further analysis of the data showed that women use even more mouthings in their signing, as 62% of the women’s signs were accompanied by mouthings, while only 33% of the men’s signs were. When comparing these figures from a potentially monolingual setting to a) other studies with a similar setting and b) studies on code-blending in bilingual settings, involving signers and non-signers in other sign languages such as ASL, this percentage seems plausible. Bank et al. (2011) observed that for all signs in their sample of highly frequent signs in Dutch Sign Language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal = NGT) 77% of the tokens were accompanied by a mouthing. Emmorey et al. (2005) found that 95% of the ASL signs in their (bilingual setting) data were accompanied by an English language mouthing. Therefore, it can be inferred that mouthings are not exclusively present in bilingual settings. The use of mouthings in potentially monolingual (involving signers only) as compared to bilingual settings is differentiated by frequency. It should be mentioned as well that, as reported in other studies, there is a high degree of variation between individual signers: while one signer only used mouthings with 1% of his signs, another used mouthings with 86% of her signs (cf. Table 2). These differences were especially visible along gender and generational lines. As mentioned above, women generally use more mouthings than men and this gender difference turned out to be closely related to age differences. While the smaller frequency of mouthings in men can be seen in all age groups, it is most pronounced in age group 3 (51+). This is shown in Figure 1 below. As can be seen, the difference between men and women becomes smaller in age group 2 as compared to age group 3. The increasing gender difference in age group 1, the youngest signers, seems puzzling. I will get back to this in Section 4.3; for an in depth analysis the reader is referred to Mohr-Militzer (2011). Another issue that seemed worth investigating was whether the frequency of mouthings in individual signers is correlated with a) their age of sign language acquisition and b) the language of communication used at home. Table 3 shows that no clear correlations could be observed. © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

196 Susanne Mohr 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Men Women Age group1



Figure 1. Correlation of gender and age with respect to mouthing frequency, N = percentage of mouthings Table 3. Correlation of acquisition age, language of communication at home, and mouthings; N = number of signers; average age of acquisition = 8;6 Age of SL acquisition

Language of communication at home7

Younger than average

Older than average

ISL

English

Home sign

> 30% mouthings

4

0

0

1

1

30–70% mouthings

1

4

2

4

3

< 70% mouthings

3

0

1

1

2

As is shown, a young age of sign language acquisition does not necessarily correlate with a high percentage of mouthings. While most signers who acquired ISL at an age younger than the average age of acquisition (8;6) use less than 30% of mouthings, almost the same number of signers in that category use more than 70% of mouthings. Further, signers who acquired ISL at an age older than the average would be expected to use most mouthings. This, too, is not the case as all of them use 30–70% of mouthings. The language of communication at home does not seem to relate to the frequency of mouthings either. Signers who communicated using ISL at home would be expected to use least mouthings. However, none of them uses less than 30% of mouthings, most of them being situated in the 30–70% category. Signers who communicated in English with their families would be expected to use most 7. In this category, three signers (Michelle, Sarah Jane and Sean) were counted double as they had given two different modes of communication at home. These can be seen in Table 1.



mouthings. This is also not the case, as most of them use 30–70% mouthings. The home signers are the only group that fulfil the expectations with respect to their mouthing behaviour. They would be expected to be a rather mixed group, which is confirmed by Table 3. Most of them use 30–70% of mouthings but there are also two subjects who use more than 70% of mouthings. Altogether, the picture is very mixed and no clear tendencies can be found. From a qualitative point of view, the mouthings are especially intriguing. As mentioned earlier, studies on code-switching and code-mixing in sign languages found that semantic congruency seems to be the driving force in manual sign + mouthing combinations (Emmorey et al. 2005; Baker & Van den Bogaerde 2008; Bank et al. 2011). Further, a one-on-one combination of manuals and mouthings has been reported to be the most frequent type of combination. Basically, the same holds true for the ISL data. In Mohr-Militzer (2011), I suggest a typology of mouthings that distinguishes eight major types and several subtypes according to the semantic and formal relation between manual sign and mouthing. The list below is a revised version of that typology and presents a more fine grained distinction than other classifications such as Bank et al. (2011).8 TYPE 1: Semantic and formal one-to-one matches of mouthings and manual signs; TYPE 2: Mouthings semantically related to the concept referred to by the manual sign; TYPE 3a: Classifier constructions only accompanied by the English verb referred to by the sign; TYPE 3b: English prepositional verbs only accompanied by the verb referred to by the sign; TYPE 4: Manual signs accompanied by inflected English verb forms or plurals; TYPE 5: Reduced mouthings; TYPE 6a: Mouthings that are in no way (semantically) related to the manual sign they accompany but add a nuance of meaning; TYPE 6b: Mouthings that are in no way (semantically) related to the manual sign they accompany but spread from an adjacent sign; TYPE 6c: Mouthings that are in no way (semantically) related to the manual sign they accompany but relate to the overall story.

8. Bank et al. (2011) introduced a distinction of mouth actions into five types, of which three are concerned with manual + mouthing combinations. These were standard mouthings (mouthing has the same meaning as the manual), mouthing variant (mouthing differs from the standard mouthing) and overlap (mouthing spreads from an adjacent sign, cf. type 6b mouthings in the current typology).


198 Susanne Mohr

The above typology is mainly based on the semantics of the manuals and mouthings. However, formal (morphological) criteria were taken into consideration as well. This especially refers to types 3 and 4, where the morphological composition of the manual and spoken language material is crucial. In type 3a mouthings, the manual material consists of polysynthetic verb constructions that also include reference to a certain noun and its features and is hence different from a simple manual being combined with a mouthing. In type 3b mouthings, the manual sign is morphologically complex in that the preposition that would be used in the spoken language was usually expressed by a certain movement pattern, a change of which would bring about a change of meaning as well. Finally, in type 4 mouthings, the accompanying mouthing from the spoken language is morphologically complex (involving an inflectional ending), which is why I decided to classify these combinations as yet another type. Apart from the combinations described above, another kind of combination was found in the data: fingerspellings and mouthings. However, I decided to exclude non-lexicalised fingerspellings from the narrow typology in the end, as they are a language contact phenomenon themselves. This does not refer to lexicalised fingerspellings like pink, for example. They were considered to be lexical material of the language similar to lexicalised signs. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that the usual relation between fingerspellings and mouthings was one of semantic congruency, as illustrated in (3). This is not surprising, as both are closely connected with the spoken language and a combination of diverging forms would not be very useful. The use of these combinations of fingerspellings and mouthings has been reported to fill lexical gaps in the sign language or in the individual’s lexicon (Boyes Braem 2001), which provides further reason for the use of semantically redundant forms, because the speaker would want to ensure comprehensibility on the part of the hearer. Examples from the ISL data are provided in (3).9 (3) a. b.

“Wexford” w-e-x-f-o-r-d “Chiangmai” c-h-i-a-n-g-m-a-i

9. For this article, notational conventions are as follows: lexical signs are glossed in small capitals; when more than one English word is needed to represent the meaning of a single manual sign, hyphens are used (e.g. throw-out); in fingerspelled words, letters are separated by hyphens (e.g. d-o-g). Non-manuals are specified above the glosses for manual signs. Mouthings are given between double quotes (e.g. “dog”), while the notation of mouth gestures follows the conventions used in the ECHO project (European Cultural Heritage Online, http://www.let.ru.nl/signlang/echo/), hence describing features like open, round, etc. The horizontal lines indicate the duration of the mouth actions.



“dog” c. d-o-g

Coming back to the six main types, in three of these (types 1, 3, and 4), semantic congruency is the principle underlying the combination. This is exemplified by the examples in (4), which are instances of type 1 mouthings, and by the examples in (5), which are instances of type 3a and 3b mouthings, respectively.10 (4) a. b.

“know” know “fool” fool

(5) a. b.

“jump” jump-over-object “throw” throw-out

The examples in (5) are especially interesting given that Boyes Braem (2001) mentions that in Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizer Gebärdensprache = DSGS), classifier verbs are usually not combined with a mouthed verb. Type 4 mouthings were also taken to create semantic congruency between the manual and the mouthing. While manual signs and inflected English verb form mouthings are not aligned at the surface level, this difference might create the semantic congruency that is called for at the content level. Due to the simultaneity of sign language morphology and due to the use of different articulators in the two language modalities, the morphologies of signed and spoken languages can be combined without impeding each other. Sign languages generally do not express tense by means of morphological tense markers on the verb but rather by other means, such as time lines or temporal adverbials. In contrast, spoken English verbs do show morphological tense marking on the verb itself. Consequently, with respect to verbs, the inflected English mouthing is necessary to create semantic congruency at the content level between the concerned items; see example (6a). The same phenomenon has been described in Baker and Van den Bogaerde (2008) and Emmorey et al. (2005), who observe that verbs constituted the largest category involved in blending. Another instance of a type 4 mouthing involves plural formation, as is illustrated in (6b), where the English mouthing is inflected for plural, while the manual sign holiday remains uninflected (i.e. is not reduplicated). 10. The examples in (5) are not instances of complete semantic congruency as only part of the information that is expressed on the hands is articulated on the mouth. However, the semantic concepts expressed are largely overlapping.


200 Susanne Mohr

(6) a. b.

“found” find “holidays” holiday

Nevertheless, there are a number of other types of combinations that do not display a relation of either formal similarity or semantic congruency. The first type are reduced mouthings of the kind exemplified by language combined with “l‑” or practice with “pra-pra-” (type 5 in the above typology). These combinations do not convey the full semantic information that is displayed on the hands and they do not seem to fulfil a specific function in the discourse either. Possible reasons for reduced mouthings may be that polysyllabic mouthings are hard to combine with monomorphemic signs and that certain sounds like /n/ are hard to see on the mouth. Bank et al. (2011) also report that in polysyllabic Dutch mouthings, the stressed syllables are consistently mouthed whereas unstressed syllables might be lost, which also holds true for the above example of “practice”. There are two other types of combinations that differ from the overall pattern as well, but which seem to fulfil a particular function, and even seem to be used deliberately, e.g. as a special story-telling technique. Type 2 mouthings are only semantically related to the concept referred to in the manual sign without being completely semantically congruent. An example of this is provided in (7). “cappuccino” (7) cup-of-tea

This phenomenon has also been observed by other researchers. Boyes Braem (2001) mentions that the meaning of mouthings and manual sign rarely overlapped in her data, and that especially late learners of DSGS often used this kind of mouthings. While she did not make a clear distinction between type 1 and type 2 mouthings in the typology suggested here, I considered this distinction necessary, as type 2 mouthings seem to be able to function as another device (besides fingerspellings combined with mouthings) to fill lexical gaps. The third type of combination not showing complete semantic congruency involves mouthings and manuals which, at first glance, do not seem to be related in any way. Upon closer inspection, however, three functional and formal patterns become apparent. The first pattern involves mouthings that add a nuance of meaning which is not expressed in the manual string (type 6a); see (8) for an illustration (note that in this example, some signs are accompanied by a mouth gesture and a mouthing in sequence, indicated by a hyphen in the non-manual line).



(8)

“shoes” closed, round – “ao” closed, stretched – “ao” shoes pointed-shoes expensive open, stretched – “brown” “beige” stripes-on-top-of-shoes b-i11 ‘The shoes were pointed shoes, expensive and had brown (and) beige stripes on top.’

Figure 2. stripes-on-top-of-shoes

In the sign sequence, the mouthings “brown” and “beige” add information concerning the colour of the stripes on top of the shoes. The manual sign only refers to the pattern on top of the shoes (see Figure 2) but does not convey information on their colour, which is exclusively expressed on the mouth. This example is similar to cases reported for Norwegian Sign Language (NSL) by Vogt-Svendsen (2001), who also found combinations of manual signs with colour term mouthings, as in pullover combined with “rød” (‘red pullover’), and called them ‘simultaneous compounds’. This term seems very appropriate in examples such as (8), as the colour brown is not expressed on the hands, while the colour beige is only referred to by an extremely abbreviated fingerspelling. This nicely illustrates the advantages of the visual-gestural as well as the oral-aural modality being available to sign languages not only in bilingual communication situations. Moreover, mouthings may spread from an adjacent sign and hence not be related at all to the manual they accompany. Generally, both progressive and regressive spreading can be observed in sign languages (Crasborn et al. 2008), although 11. At this point, the signer wanted to spell the word “beige” but obviously did not know its correct orthographic form. She stopped after spelling the letters b-i.


202 Susanne Mohr

some sign languages show preferences for a certain type. In ISL, both types of spreading were found. Example (9a) shows regressive spreading, while example (9b) shows progressive spreading. (9) a. b.

“keep” index1 keep ‘I kept […]’ “chair” chair index1 ‘my chair’

These examples are in line with results from other studies according to which spreading usually occurs from content to function word or establishes prosodic linking (Pfau 2005, 2009; Crasborn et al. 2008). Hence, in these cases, the mouthing closely links the pronoun and the lexical sign. However, spreading from content to content word was also observed. It seems to fulfil certain functions such as linking syntactic constituents. As spreading is not the main topic of this paper, it will not be elaborated on further. One more note seems in order, though. Mouthings of type 6b are only concerned with one of the manuals involved in the spreading, i.e. the manual that is not the “source” of the spread mouthing. In regressive spreading, as in example (9a), this is the manual preceding the source; in progressive spreading, as in (9b), this is the manual following the source. The other manual (the “source” of the mouthing) involved in these combinations usually shows a type 1 mouthing combination. In other words: example (9a) combines a type 6b mouthing (combination of index1 and “keep”) and a type 1 mouthing (combination of keep and “keep”). Finally, there are mouthings that function as a relation to the general storyline (type 6c) and could thus be classified as a narrative technique. An example of this can be seen in (10). “for-my” “garden” “bag” “fuck, shit” (10) keen for-my garden hold-object-and-handbag ‘[I was] keen on my garden, but holding a handbag and another object — damn.’

The mouthing that is interesting in this case is “fuck, shit” combined with the manual sign hold-object-and-handbag (see Figure 3). It appears to be a metalinguistic remark, a comment on the thoughts the signer was having at that particular situation described in the story, namely holding several objects in her hand but having no place to put them. A slightly different example is (11), because we are not dealing with a metalinguistic remark. However, the mouthing can still be classified in the same category as (10), as it relates to the general storyline and



Figure 3. hold-object-and-handbag

seems to be a narrative technique. It is also different from (8), since the information conveyed by the mouthings in that example is not ultimately necessary for text cohesion. “he” “my” “friend” (11) index3 man friend ‘That man is my friend.’

Figure 4. man


204 Susanne Mohr

The possessive pronoun expressed on the mouth while signing man (see Figure 4) is not realized at all in the manual signs. The mouthing seems to be used as a systematic means to ensure text cohesion and hence also relates to the general storyline of the narrative. This last type of mouthing is especially interesting, as it occurred very often in one signer, who was telling a story about a misunderstanding between her hearing daughter and herself. Her daughter kept using the manual sign ladder with the mouthing “bike” when she was still a little child and had confused the signs ladder and bike, which share the same location and orientation, but are different in handshape and movement in ISL. Moreover, the mouthings looked rather exaggerated in this case, as they were over-enunciated. Boyes Braem (2001) mentions this kind of combination and its complexity as well. She calls the imitation of a hearing person’s speech “constructed speaking”. This kind of phenomenon has also been classified as a type 6c mouthing here. The different types of mouthings were also different in frequency especially along gender lines. The general tendency, though, was that, for both the male and female participants, type 1 mouthings accounted for more than half of the data. Two other percentages that are noteworthy concern type 2 mouthings, which were very rare (0.2%) in men, and type 6a mouthings, which were very rare (0.8%) in women. Table 4 provides an overview of the frequencies of the different types. Table 4. Frequencies of mouthing types in men and women Women

Men

Type 1

329 (54.3%)

272 (59.4%)

Type 2

37 (6.1%)

1 (0.2%)

Type 3a

7 (1.2%)

11 (2.4%)

Type 3b

28 (4.6%)

25 (5.5%)

Type 4

30 (5.0%)

9 (2.0%)

Type 5

48 (7.9%)

9 (2.0%)

Type 6a

5 (0.8%)

25 (5.5%)

Type 6b

52 (8.6%)

29 (6.3%)

Type 6c

39 (6.4%)

34 (7.4%)

Others

31 (5.1%)

43 (9.4%)

Note that in both columns, the frequencies of mouthings of the six types displayed in Table 4 do not add up to 100%. This is due to (i) the exclusion of non-lexicalised fingerspellings accompanied by mouthings and (ii) two possible manual + mouthing combinations that were not included in the above typology. Those are sole mouthings, i.e. mouthings not accompanying a manual sign, and a group of mouthings combined with a single manual sign. Sole mouthings rarely occurred © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


in the data, they were not attested in the male data at all and only constituted single instances in the women’s data. Groups of mouthings accompanying one manual were observed more frequently. They, too, were much more frequent in women than in men, though. 4.3 Discussion As has become apparent in the previous section, mouthings as a result of language contact in the Irish Deaf community are a complex phenomenon. The first important point to mention here are the differences between men and women in their mouthing behaviour. The differences in frequency are to be explained by the different dates of introduction of oralism to the boys’ and girls’ schools. Thus, the men of age group 3 use considerably less mouthings than the women of the same age group. This difference persists into the youngest age group (age group 1) although it becomes less pronounced, as was shown in Figure 1. This development might be due to societal changes in European Deaf communities, as mentioned by Woll & Ladd (2003). Further, the types of mouthings in men and women also show several differences (cf. Table 4). While both groups use type 1 mouthings most frequently, type 2 mouthings are very rare in men, while type 6a mouthings are very rare in women. The exact implications of these differences in mouthing types remain to be determined, as they were not the main issue of this paper. In general, there seems to be a development towards the use of more mouthings in present-day ISL, irrespective of gender. On a more general level, the observations made in this study remain interesting. Although other studies acknowledged the existence of mouthings in sign languages in general and investigated their increased use in bilingual situations in a code-blending framework, the results of the current study raise new questions. The frequent use of mouthings in a potentially monolingual sign language situation, i.e. when telling another signer a story, is rather unexpected. Yet more intriguing are the functional and formal patterns that are visible in the use of these mouthings. While semantic congruency seems to be the driving force in this monolingual situation just as in code-blending contexts studied by e.g. Emmorey et al. (2005) or Baker & van den Bogaerde (2008), it was shown that mouthings may deliberately deviate from the manual signs they accompany on the surface level. This deviation also serves specific functions, such as text cohesion or prosodic binding. The implications of these findings are twofold. Firstly, the rather high frequency of mouthings in a communicative situation involving native signers only may hint at the fact that, as Emmorey et al. (2005) suggest, both languages are always active to some extent in the bilingual brain (of signers). In their study, bilingual CODAs occasionally uttered signs when talking to a non-signer. The findings © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

206 Susanne Mohr

from the current study may have the same implications, as the persistent language contact with the surrounding oral-aural language could cause the bilingual signers’ brains to stay in a bilingual mode all the time. Grosjean (2008) also mentions that Deaf signers rarely find themselves at the monolingual signing end of the language mode continuum, i.e. that the guest language (English in the case of ISL) is always activated to a relatively high degree. This explanation does not seem fully applicable, though. If Emmorey at al. (2005)’s suggestion were right, this would mean that all other sign languages — whose signers are always bilingual, as was outlined in section two — would have to show a high incidence of mouthings (even in deaf-deaf communicative situations) as well. This however, is not the case. The increased use of mouthings in potentially monolingual communication situations could be indicative that the situations are just that: potentially monolingual, but actually bilingual. Given the sustained language contact between signed and spoken language, signers might not be able to switch into a monolingual sign language communication mode. Hence, sign language interspersed with (extremely altered) spoken language material might be the most monolingual choice possible. This is further supported by Grosjean’s concept of language mode. The factors of participants and situation are crucial here: he mentions that communication with another bilingual person (the Deaf researcher in the case of the current analysis) automatically causes the bilingual to move towards the bilingual end of the language mode continuum. This would imply that we have to rethink and probably reformulate the definition of monolingualism (and bilingualism) in the context of sign languages, as almost all Deaf interlocutors are bilingual and a completely monolingual situation would thus be inexistent. It could also be argued that English word mouthings as borrowings have become a crucial and even integral part of Irish Sign Language, so much so that they are no longer even (cognitively) perceived to be elements from another language and another modality. The mouth being an articulator in sign languages in general (in mouth gestures for example) might favour this development. Bank et al. (2011) come to a similar conclusion for the mouthings combined with high frequency signs in NGT. Those mouthings seem to be firmly established in the NGT lexicon. Adding to this, mouthings are usually assimilated to the visual-gestural modality in that they are often reduced words of the surrounding spoken language and are usually not voiced as actual spoken language words. Irish signers usually do not voice their mouthings with other deaf people either (Lorraine Leeson, p.c.). This development is similar to borrowing processes in spoken languages where words from another language might be assimilated to the phonology of the receiving language. An example of this is the Italian borrowing pizza into German where it has lost the [dz] phoneme that it features in Italian and substituted this by [ts]. Ultimately, the devoicing of mouthings in ISL might constitute an integration of © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


material from the donor language (English) into the system of the recipient language (ISL). It could be argued that this is the result of a language change that took place within the past 50 years.12 This is supported by the results shown in Figure 1, illustrating that the frequency of mouthings in ISL has increased radically over three generations, especially in men. Moreover, studies mentioning that a change in the social life of Deaf communities towards increased contact with hearing people and an avoidance of Deaf clubs, for instance, can be observed (Woll & Ladd 2003), emphasise this claim. This is called a change from an opposing to an integrating community, as both sub-communities exist alongside each other and accept the other community. This kind of change might ultimately have taken place or be in progress in the Irish Deaf community. Finally, the specific functions that mouthings fulfil also point towards a firm integration of mouthings in ISL. This further supports the claim that a language change has taken place, resulting in the full integration of the borrowed elements into the system. Hence, mouthings can now be used alongside highly morphologically complex linguistic structures (Militzer 2010), which is said to be more likely with language inherent material (Crasborn et al. 2008). The fact that mouthings spread in a similar fashion to mouth gestures as language inherent elements in order to provide prosodic binding, for example, is another case in point. Consequently, Ebbinghaus & Heßmann (2001) seem to be right in claiming that sign language has to be seen as a form of multidimensional communication that consists of different elements taken from different modalities. However, given the current results, it seems rather doubtful whether manual signs, mouthings (and mouth gestures) are actually completely separate entities. In the light of the current findings this does not seem applicable, at least not to ISL. 5. Conclusion The results presented here allow for preliminary conclusions with respect to language contact between English and Irish Sign Language in the Irish Deaf community and with respect to sign languages and cross-modal contact in general. For ISL, the findings show that mouthings, despite their non-native origin in spoken English, are indeed a vital part of the language and are fully integrated into the linguistic system. It should also be emphasised that they are not only used in bilingual situations but also in potentially monolingual ones. Whether monolingualism in these contexts actually exists and is completely congruent with monolingualism 12. This change may still be ongoing, which is supported by several facts such as the great variation between individual signers.


208 Susanne Mohr

in spoken language contact situations, remains to be determined. From the results obtained here, viewed in the framework of language mode, it is rather doubtful that a sign language monolingual situation could be created. Combined with the findings on generational differences in ISL, displaying an increase of the frequency of mouthings in younger signers, it can be inferred that language change has taken place in ISL, developing from a language with few borrowings (mouthings) from the surrounding spoken language two generations ago, to a language with more borrowings (mouthings) in present-day ISL. Terminology should be changed accordingly in this case, as mouthings seem to have become loanwords at least, if not permanent lexical items. However, it should be emphasised that the current findings do not imply that ISL or sign languages in general become increasingly dependent on the surrounding spoken language in contemporary societies. Rather, it shows that cross-modal language contact is a very complex phenomenon that researchers are only beginning to understand. Furthermore, common spoken language contact or sociolinguistic frameworks need to be expanded in order to analyse cross-modal contact which seems to be much richer in its possibilities of creating and accommodating new linguistic entities in visual-gestural languages. Especially the option of going beyond the visual-gestural modality and organising linguistic material from both modalities simultaneously, drastically enriches the range of language contact phenomena that can be encountered. More, and more detailed research in this area is necessary in order for us to fully understand the dynamics and results of crossmodal language contact.

Acknowledgements Data from the Signs of Ireland Corpus are used with permission of the Centre for Deaf Studies, Trinity College Dublin. I am grateful for Lorraine Leeson’s support during my stay at CDS in spring 2009. Special thanks to all the signers whose data I used for this study: Caroline W., Eilish B., Fergus D., Fergus M., Kevin L., Laurence H., Marian H., Michelle M., Noeleen D., Peter M., Sarah-Jane M. and Sean H. Further, I would like to thank Silvia Kutscher and Anastasia Bauer for their constructive feedback on the contents of this paper and Vanessa Crouch for proof-reading.

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bilingualism: language development, interaction, and maintenance in sign language contact situations, 1–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bank, Richard, Onno Crasborn & Roeland van Hout. 2011. Variation in mouth actions with manual signs in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Sign Language & Linguistics 14(2). 248–270. Berent, Gerald P. 2004. Sign language — spoken language bilingualism: Code mixing and mode mixing by ASL-English bilinguals. In Tej K. Bhatia & William C. Ritchie (eds.), The handbook of bilingualism, 312–335. Oxford: Blackwell. Boyes Braem, Penny. 2001. Functions of the mouthings in the signing of deaf early and late learners of Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS). In Penny Boyes-Braem & Rachel SuttonSpence (eds.), The hands are the head of the mouth. The mouth as articulator in sign languages, 99–131. Hamburg: Signum. Boyes-Braem, Penny & Rachel Sutton-Spence (eds.). 2001. The hands are the head of the mouth. The mouth as articulator in sign languages. Hamburg: Signum. Crasborn, Onno, Els van der Kooij, Dafydd Waters, Bencie Woll & Johanna Mesch. 2008. Frequency distribution and spreading behavior of different types of mouth actions in three different sign languages. Sign Language & Linguistics 11(1). 45–67. Ebbinghaus, Horst & Jens Heßmann. 2001. Sign language as multidimensional communication: Why manual signs, mouthings and mouth gestures are three different things. In Penny Boyes-Braem & Rachel Sutton-Spence (eds.), The hands are the head of the mouth. The mouth as articulator in sign languages, 133–151. Hamburg: Signum. Emmorey, Karen, Harry B. Borinstein & Robin Thompson. 2005. Bimodal bilingualism: Codeblending between spoken English and American Sign Language. In James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad & Jeff MacSwan (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, 663–673. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Grosjean, François. 1997. Processing mixed language: Issues, findings and models. In Annette De Groot & Judith F. Kroll (eds.), Tutorials in bilingualism: psycholinguistic perspectives, 225–254. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Grosjean, François. 2001. The bilingual’s language mode. In Janet L. Nicol (ed.), One mind, two languages: bilingual language processing, 1–22. Oxford: Blackwell. Grosjean, François. 2008. Studying bilinguals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hohenberger, Annette & Daniela Happ. 2001. The linguistic primacy of signs over mouthings: Evidence from language production in German Sign Language (DGS). In Penny BoyesBraem & Rachel Sutton-Spence (eds.) The hands are the head of the mouth. The mouth as articulator in sign languages, 153–189. Hamburg: Signum. Leeson, Lorraine. 2008. Quantum leap. Leveraging the Signs of Ireland digital corpus in Irish Sign Language/English interpreter training. The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter 2(2). 149–176. Leeson, Lorraine & Carmel Grehan. 2004. To the lexicon and beyond: The effect of gender variation on Irish Sign Language. In Mieke van Herreweghe & Myriam Vermeerbergen (eds.), To the lexicon and beyond: sociolinguistics in European deaf communities, 39–73. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Leeson, Lorraine & Brian Nolan. 2008. Digital deployment of the Signs of Ireland Corpus in E-learning. Paper presented at the 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Exploitation of Sign Languages, Marrakech. Le Master, Barbara & John P. Dwyer. 1991. Knowing and using female and male signs in Dublin. Sign Language Studies 73. 361–396.


210 Susanne Mohr Lucas, Ceil. 2001. Introduction. In Ceil Lucas (ed.), The sociolinguistics of sign languages, 1–7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthews, Patrick A. 1996. The Irish deaf community, volume 1. Survey report, history of education, language and culture. Dublin: The Linguistics Institute of Ireland. McGurk, Harry & John MacDonald. 1976. Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature 264. 746–748. Militzer, Susanne. 2009. The influence of oralism on mouth actions in Irish Sign Language (ISL). Poster presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 34), Boston, MA. Militzer, Susanne. 2010. Mouth actions and morphological complexity of verbs in Irish Sign Language (ISL). Paper presented at the 9th High Desert Linguistics Society Conference (HDLS 9), Albuquerque, NM. Mohr-Militzer, Susanne. 2011. Mouth actions in Irish Sign Language — Their system and functions. PhD dissertation, University of Cologne. Nadolske, Marie A. & Rachel Rosenstock. 2007. Occurrence of mouthings in American Sign Language: A preliminary study. In Pamela M. Perniss, Roland Pfau & Markus Steinbach (eds.), Visible variation. Comparative studies on sign language structure, 36–61. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nyst, Victoria. 2007. A descriptive analysis of Adamorobe Sign Language (Ghana). PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Utrecht: LOT. Nyst, Victoria. 2012. Shared sign languages. In Roland Pfau, Markus Steinbach & Bencie Woll (eds.), Sign languages. An international handbook, 552–573. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pfau, Roland. 2005. Phrasal layers and prosodic spreading in sign languages. Paper presented at the SIGNA VOLANT Workshop, Milano. Pfau, Roland. 2009. On spreading: Domains and hierarchies. Paper presented at the Workshop “Non-manuals in sign languages”, Frankfurt/Main. Plaza Pust, Carolina. 2005. Language contact in Deaf bilingualism. In Helen Leuninger & Daniela Happ (eds.), Gebärdensprachen: Struktur, Erwerb, Verwendung, 271–307. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. Poplack, Shana & Marjory Meechan. 1998. How languages fit together in codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism 2(2). 127–138. Schermer, Trude. 1990. In search of a language: Influences from spoken Dutch on sign language of the Netherlands. Delft: Eburon. Sutton-Spence, Rachel & Bencie Woll. [1999] 2006. The linguistics of British sign language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Graham. 1995. Contact signing and language shift. In Heleen Bos & Trude Schermer (eds.), Sign language research 1994, 211–229. Hamburg: Signum. Vogt-Svendsen, Marit. 2001. A comparison of mouth gestures and mouthings in Norwegian Sign Language (NSL). In Penny Boyes-Braem & Rachel Sutton-Spence (eds.), The hands are the head of the mouth. The mouth as articulator in sign languages, 9–40. Hamburg: Signum. Volterra, Virginia, Alessandro Laudanna, Serena Corazza, Elena Radutsky & Francesco Natale. 1984. Italian Sign Language: The order of elements in the declarative sentence. In Filip Loncke, Penny Boyes-Braem & Yvan Lebrun (eds.), Recent research on European sign language, 19–48. Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger. Woll, Bencie, Rachel Sutton-Spence & Frances Elton. 2001. Multilingualism: The global approach to sign languages. In Ceil Lucas (ed.), The sociolinguistics of sign languages, 8–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Woll, Bencie & Paddy Ladd. 2003. Deaf communities. In Mark Marschark & Patricia E. Spencer (eds.), Oxford handbook of deaf studies, language, and education, 151–163. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Author’s address Susanne Mohr English Department Heinrich-Heine-University 40225 Düsseldorf Germany [email protected]


The visual-gestural modality and beyond

The visual-gestural modality and beyond

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