Department Colloquium: A special kind of lexical expressions - iconic word classes in spoken and sign languages

Time
Thursday, 6. June 2024
11:45 - 13:15

Location
G 307

Organizer
Department of Linguistics

Speaker:
Cornelia Ebert and Markus Steinbach (University Göttingen and University Frankfurt)

Typological research has shown that many typologically different spoken languages have ideophones, a special class of words which can be defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). Based on data from German Sign Language (DGS), we argue that also sign languages have a special class of signs, so-called idiomatic signs, that share the defining properties of ideophones and show related semantic behavior.
Abstract