This paper presents a study of four recurrent gestures: sweeping away, holding away, brushing away and throwing away. These forms have so far only been studied for spoken languages and are said to form the ‘family of Away gestures’, which is semantically motivated by the effect of actions of… read more
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… read more
Reformulation is remarkably frequent in discourse and has been the subject of much work in spoken languages, both on written and oral data. Because of its metalinguistic nature, combined with its general aim of clarifying an expression, the act of reformulation offers a window to the way… read more
This paper provides the first contrastive analysis of a coherence relation (viz. addition) and its connectives across a sign language (French Belgian Sign Language) and a spoken language (French), both used in the same geographical area. The analysis examines the frequency and types of… read more
This paper provides a description of the distribution of buoys across genres and of their possible functions as discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language. We selected a sample of dialogic genres – argumentative, explanatory, narrative, and metalinguistic – produced by different signers… read more