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Introduction published In:
Signed and spoken language contrastive research: A multimodal approach
Edited by Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant
[Languages in Contrast 22:2] 2022
► pp. 169–194
Introduction

Contrasting signed and spoken languages

Towards a renewed perspective on language

ORCID logo | Stockholm University , Sweden | University of Namur , Belgium
ORCID logo | University of Namur , Belgium

For years, the study of spoken languages, on the basis of written and then also oral productions, was the only way to investigate the human language capacity. As an introduction to this first volume of Languages in Contrast devoted to the comparison of spoken and signed languages, we propose to look at the reasons for the late emergence of the consideration of signed languages and multimodality in language studies. Next, the main stages of the history of sign language research are summarized. We highlight the benefits of studying cross-modal and multimodal data, as opposed to the isolated investigation of signed or spoken languages, and point out the remaining methodological obstacles to this approach. This contextualization prefaces the presentation of the outline of the volume.

Keywords: sign language linguistics, gesture studies, multimodality, signed/spoken languages, corpora, contrastive studies
Article outline
  • 1.Language, gesture and sign
    • 1.1A delayed revolution
    • 1.2A new agenda
  • 2.Sign language linguistics
    • 2.1Stages of history of sign language research
    • 2.2Corpus-based linguistics
  • 3.Spoken and signed language contrastive studies
    • 3.1The shortcoming of studying signed vs. spoken languages separately
    • 3.2Conducting (spoken vs. signed) contrastive studies on the basis of comparable multimodal data
  • 4.Outline of the volume
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00024.gab
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