Manual and nonmanual cues used for the prosodic encoding of contrastive focus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language)

This paper explores the manual and nonmanual prosodic markers used to express contrastivefocus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language). To investigate this informationunit, videos extracted from the LSFB Corpus (Meurant 2015) and produced by six nativedeaf signers in two tasks were annotated and analysed. The preliminary results, basedon both quantitative and qualitative analyses, show that contrastive focus is encodedby discernible prosodic patterns in LSFB at the level of stress and intonation. Stressmarkers include variations in duration, mouth articulations, holds, and combinationsof manual cues. Regarding intonation, the results suggest a differentiation in the usageof body leans and head movements on contrastive focus and in the surroundingcontext, and support the notion of componentiality (or layering) of nonmanual markers.Ultimately, the study challenges the view of a one-to-one relationship between specificmarkers and their meanings, suggesting that meaning emerges from the interplayofmultiple resources.