Talk by Ulrike Zeshan

Abstract: Sign language typology is the typologically driven study of languages that use the visual-gestural rather than the auditory-vocal modality. This allows typologists to consider issues of language modality alongside typological patterns. In this presentation, I give an overview of past and present developments in sign language typology and introduce cross-modal typology as a new development in the field. Over the past 15 years, several studies in sign language typology have examined domains of linguistic structures in over 30 sign languages, and I summarise some key findings from research in the domains of interrogatives, negation, possession, and numerals, highlighting issues of general relevance such as areal typology and grammaticalisation. The second part of the presentation focuses on the various types of modality effects that we can observe when systematically investigating signed and spoken language data side-by-side. This is a crucial component of cross-modal typology. Modality effects may be absolute, where features exist only in one of the modalities, or relative, where features are more frequent in one modality than the other. However, categorising modality effects and relating them to patterns of typological variation is not straightforward and presents new challenges for typology.