{"title":"Simultaneity of certainty in Turkish Sign Language (TİD)","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.pragma.2024.08.010","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>As collaborative discourse participants, interlocutors are expected to convey how certain they are about the proposition that they put forward in the discourse. In spoken language literature, speakers use various strategies to convey their certainty like attitude verbs, prosody, or gestures. Sign language literature reports that signers mostly modulate their manual (hands) signs and nonmanuals (face and body movements), yet there is no study investigating how both channels interact in the expression of certainty. The current study tests the degree to which different sentence types and nonmanuals affect the signer certainty in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) in a rating study. I show that signers interpret signer certainty by taking into account cues from both manual and nonmanual channels. Within the framework of threshold semantics, I discuss how sentences set the certainty threshold, and show how nonmanuals boost or deboost the threshold. Specifically, head nod increases the threshold while squint decreases it, thus providing further support for the dynamic nature of thresholds.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216624001619","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
As collaborative discourse participants, interlocutors are expected to convey how certain they are about the proposition that they put forward in the discourse. In spoken language literature, speakers use various strategies to convey their certainty like attitude verbs, prosody, or gestures. Sign language literature reports that signers mostly modulate their manual (hands) signs and nonmanuals (face and body movements), yet there is no study investigating how both channels interact in the expression of certainty. The current study tests the degree to which different sentence types and nonmanuals affect the signer certainty in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) in a rating study. I show that signers interpret signer certainty by taking into account cues from both manual and nonmanual channels. Within the framework of threshold semantics, I discuss how sentences set the certainty threshold, and show how nonmanuals boost or deboost the threshold. Specifically, head nod increases the threshold while squint decreases it, thus providing further support for the dynamic nature of thresholds.
期刊介绍:
Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.