Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of Language Contact on Relative Clauses in Two Signed Languages

In communities with extensive spoken language bilingualism, the grammars of the languages speakers use can converge, becoming more similar to each other over time. Very little is known about what happens in communities where more than one signed language is used. Do signed languages in contact converge over time?

The goal of this dissertation research is to document and describe how monolingual and bilingual signers in different communities differ in their use of grammatical structures in their languages. The project seeks to shed light on the grammatical properties of vulnerable and understudied signed languages, as well as provide insight into how multilingualism impacts the structure of language more generally.

This research project focuses on the use of relative clauses in predominantly monolingual and bilingual signing communities. Relative clauses are sentences that modify nouns to help distinguish a person or thing from a group or add more information about it. For example: "The girl who read the book" or "The cat that I was petting" are nouns with relative clauses that provide more information about those nouns.

How languages mark relative clauses varies: with a specialized linking word such as "who" or "that", with changes in word order, or with prosody/tone. In spoken languages, grammatical structures like relative clauses can be impacted by extensive language contact and multilingualism, leading to new varieties of the languages in contact that are distinct from monolingual language varieties.

However, relative clauses are under researched in signed languages, as is bilingualism and language contact. This project uses existing assessment tools to determine if relative clauses in two signed languages are becoming more similar to each other in communities with high levels of bilingualism in those signed languages. Narrative, conversation, description, and grammaticality data from two signed languages will be collected with monolingual and bilingual signers in different communities.

Relative clause grammatical structure and use will be compared across monolingual and bilingual signers in each language in order to identify community-specific grammatical patterns and to determine whether any differences between monolingual and bilingual language use are due to grammatical convergence in bilingual communities. Together, this project aims to tease apart subtle distinctions in the use of grammatical structure to identify outcomes of signed language bilingualism on grammar.

This research contributes to our understanding of language as a human faculty by increasing scientific knowledge about signed languages and how they are used by communities and individuals, as well as increasing language infrastructure.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.