- Author
- Year
- 2015
- host editors
-
A.D.M. Smith
G. Trousdale
R. Waltereit - Title
- The grammaticalization of headshakes: From head movement to negative head
- Book title
- New directions in grammaticalization research
- Pages (from-to)
- 9-50
- Number of pages
- 42
- Publisher
- Amsterdam: John Benjamins
- ISBN
- 9789027259318
- Series
- Studies in Language Companion Series, 166
- Document type
- Chapter
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities (FGw)
- Institute
- Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC)
- Abstract
-
All sign languages investigated to date make use of a side-to-side headshake in the context of negation. This headshake, however, is qualitatively different from the co-speech gesture used by speakers in similar contexts. Following a discussion of the origin and use of gestural headshakes, we show that across sign languages, the distribution of headshakes - in particular, their scope and co-occurrence with manual negative elements - is subject to language-specific constraints, which
are clearly linguistic in nature. We thus argue that the headshake, as used in sign languages, is a linguistic element which has grammaticalized from a gestural input. We further discuss different types of sign language negation systems from a typological perspective, and we provide some speculations on their evolution in terms of Jespersen’s Cycle. - URL
- go to publisher's site
- Language
- English
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.484377
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