Thread by @AliceRGaby

Sally Rice opens our workshop (Minority Languages and CogLing: towards a two-way relationship) reflecting on the massive contribution minority lgs have made to CL and how CogLinguists are uniquely positioned to reciprocate w insights of interest to minority communities #ICLC15

Ending with a call to arms, linguists have a moral obligation to support speakers of MLgs in their language (reclamation or other) goals

next up: Evangelia Adamou, Erendira Calderon, Stefano De Pascale explore "how to speak geocentric in an egocentric language", among Ngigua/Spanish bilinguals

SPEAKING NGIGUA: example 1: we see geocentric information coded through gesture while topological info is coded linguistically. Example 2: direct pointing combines with deictic and topological expressions

SPEAKING SPANISH: Geocentric gesture combines with deictic terms or w topological expressions (e.g. below/above). We also see gestures compatible w both geocentric/egocentric frames combining with egocentric vocabulary

SPANISH MONOLINGUALS: first use of gecentric direction terms, as well as geocentric gesture with deictic and topological expressions

So: language is *not* a good predictor for preferred frames of reference, we need to pay attention to lifestyle and how people are interacting with their environment [at this point I leap out of my seat shouting YES!]

Also important to pay attention to how even Spanish monolinguals may use ways of speaking Spanish to mark identity

Now: Sherman Wilcox, Yufuko Takashima and Eikoh Kuroda:
"Signed Languages as Minority Languages". Focusing on urban sign languages vs shared/village sign languages (of many different communities) and the endangering pressures on them #ICLC15

you might think that sign languages in large, urban areas of industrialised countries would not face endangering pressures, but you would be wrong. They face perhaps more, and more pernicious endangering pressures. Cf. Harlan Lane's work on dialectization and replacement

for deaf communities, the porcess of dialectization = the assumption that the natural sign language is not sufficient, it needs to look like the spoken language (corresponding categories). Replacement = oralism.

In Japan: deaf schools established in 1880s, but 1933-1993 was an era of oral education (teachers banned from using sign lgs at school = replacement). 1940-1970 forced sterilization of deaf people, reducing native signing population. 1993 onwards, we're in era of dialectization

because of sterilization, signers who are now aged in their 50s-60s had few native signing peers when they were in school. From 1993, educators do not use Japanese Sign Language (JSL), instead using signed Japanese.

Our current cochlear implant era is reducing the number of deaf (potential signers), which reduces the budget for people with hearing impairment. Surgery deprives deaf children the opportunity to learn their native sign lg because medical and education professionals discourage

while the endangerment pressures in operation here might not be like those that threaten spoken languages, they are nonetheless strong. Pressures to create sign lgs reflecting the grammar of spoken lgs, pressures to replace sign lgs with oralism, eugenics, medical lobbying.

Q: how does this relate to CL? Answer: CL is more digestible to signing community, and are more revealing of the structures of sign lgs. There is a craving among deaf people to learn linguistics and learn to describe their own lg

providing accessibility to CL is tough. Scholars learn a lot by coming to ICLC. But deaf community in general can't get a lot out of a 20 minute talk at a mile a minute with an interpreter who doesn't know the field well. Need more small-scale workshops while people skill up.

Eve Sweetser: it's inappropriate to use many formal models for signed lgs, but maybe bc CL takes embodiment seriously it is better suited to the task

Terry Janda: the irony is that in formal education for a deaf kid, so much time is spent on language rather than content

[lunch time now, and then I'll take a break from tweeting to present a paper w Lesley Woods on "Ethics and collaboration between cognitive linguists and speakers of minority languages"]

the next talk is by Laura A. Janda and Lene Antonsen, speaking about North Sámi Possessive Constructions in the Era of Truth and Reconciliation. They find that the timing of the forced removal of children to residential schools correlates with lg change... #iclc15

not only in terms of interrupted lg transmission, but also with a marked rise in the frequency of the analytic (as opposed to the morphological) possessive construction. This is potentially evidence of discriminatory social policies catalysing language change

changing frequency of the two constructions in turn correlates with their reinterpretation as semantically contrastive: the (formerly infrequent) analytic construction used for for alienable possession, the suffix for inalienable

the specifics of how each kind of possession is classified (in)alienable is also revealing of cultural salience

Simon Devylder now presents a beautiful array of "mutis en atan", Paamese sand drawings (including of shameful history of Australian Blackbirders enslaving people to work on sugar cane farms)

so what are these drawings for and what do they mean? "It's like a school", according to one collaborator. Unlike what has been documented in Australia, it's often described as a way of writing and compared to school.

a way of capturing and transmitting knowledge about Paamese traditional life & environment to the next generation.

sometimes iconic, sometimes symbolic. It is interactive, dynamic, and polysemiotic (involving language, gesture and the picture itself)

Simon also provided sand drawers w iPads, allowing them to capture the creation of the drawings

Q about gender. Answer: while in Australia sand drawings are generally done only by women, in this case sand drawings are men's business (an alternative semiotic form w ropes is women's business)

if someone wants to reproduce a drawing that belongs/was passed down from another location, it's necessary to place plants from the original location beside the drawing

NEXT: Maïa Ponsonnet, James Bednall and Isabel O’Keeffe on "The respective roles of culture and grammar in shaping emotion metaphors The case of the Gunwinyguan family" #ICLC15

@isabelanneok begins with an exploration of body parts in figurative representations of emotions. @Maia_Ponsonnet joins us via video (embedded in the presentation) as well as Skype for question time. James Bednall by video only

this project seeks to explore the cultural significance of figurative language and body-based tropes without falling into the trap of exoticising the people and cultures involved

not all body-based emotional tropes arise on the basis of conceptual associations relevant to speakers synchronically, they may be highly conventionalised.

The big question is: how tight is the nexus between shared conceptual representations and figurative language? To answer it, the authors are focusing on the (geographically distributed) Gunwinyguan language family and looking for areal patterns

if figurative language reflects culture it should not vary within the lg family. Across lgs of the family, many figurative collocations are frozen noun incorporation constructions. Some tropes recur, but beyond this no uniformity across the family.

There is variation in the tropes themselves, and similar tropes may be expressed by different roots (and/or with variation in the specific body part invoked). In particular, Anindilyakwa and Wubuy exhibit a v different profile from the lgs of the central area

we see tropes with tail, testicles and voice not attested in the central Gunwinyguan region. Even shared body parts exhibit v different patterns. Pending data from Ngandi and Ngalakgan (spoken in the region in between) may shed further light

in terms of cultural patterns, eastern Gunwinyguan lgs also diverge from the central G lgs, though not an entirely different cultural world.

Conclusions: emotion tropes exist across the lgs independently of the forms that express them. Tropes themselves more stable tan the body parts they involve. Figurative systems can drift fast when contact loosens, faster than shared representations.

Our final research paper for the workshop is from Stef Spronck: "Finding a new place for pragmatics in CL through minority languages" via the exploration of the Ungarinyin avoidance speech style #ICLC15

speakers were traditionally highly multilingual, commonly speaking 3-4+ languages. In addition to the everyday lg, people also knew avoidance styles to be used by widows or between mother-in-law/son-in-law

this demonstrates the intertwining of language meaning, structure and use. Avoidance speech is indexed through lexicon, alternative verb inflection, prosody... the full spectrum of language is affected

this supports Langacker's claim that "any strict line of demarcation [between semantics and pragmatics] is arbitrary". But that is not to say that there is no meaningful distinction between the two. People make very strong normative statements about social appropriateness