Thread by @dapiridoobman

Keynote by @ryanlepic now! @ErinWilkinson let’s us KNOW how our influential our Youthful Ryan’s work on ASL morphology had been, especially his excellent @glossa_oa paper!

This is Ryan’s 4th #HDLS, and it’s his fave conf (he’s been trying to get me to go for yearsss)

I’m glad that Ryan’s mic is muted bc I’m laughing with joy and glee at this loving intro by Erin! #HDLS14

pardon the photo of the chat but this is iconic

Ryan shouts out ABQ and FRONTIER BURRITOS in his intro, as well as that famous Dave Chapelle vehicle Youve Got Mail! #HDLS14

@ryanlepic’s Big Q: how do we characterize the analyzable pieces of signs?

A: Sign Schemas, emergent units of lg abstracted over networks of individual exemplars — let’s extend this to subsign parts!!! #HDLS14

What’s made analyzing these subparts of words (esp in sign languages) so hard???

@ryanlepic: ASL has a STRUCTURALISM problem. we worry too much about the pieces and not language dynamics and use

#HDLS14

@ryanlepic lays out his usage-based construction grammar approach, in which we can ask,
for a form-meaning mapping: “what’s the range of functions?” “what are related Cxns?” “how are they learned and processed?” “which parts are analyzable?” #HDLS14

@ryanlepic on attempts to exhaustively break down signs into morphemes based on the idea that there must be abstract units which make up every word: “we can leave that assumption where it belongs: in the 80s”
me: HAAAAA!
#HDLS14

@ryanlepic shows how thinking of relations across signs as constructional networks can allow us to stop wasting time asking whether something is morpheme or phoneme, freeing us to ask more exciting Qs! #HDLS14

@ryanlepic uses a cool dataset, from ASL signers asked to create neologisms for internet slang, to show us how metalinguistic knowledge about the relationship btw meaning and form in ASL (+ENGLISH!) results in patterned variation in the strategies used to make new words! #HDLS14

This type of data tells us about what form-meaning relationships are active/present/available for language users — it’s a window into our constructional networks! #HDLS14

I’m behind now bc I was oohing at a dope animation 🤣

@ryanlepic asks us to think about sign innovation as analogical extension as opposed to building new meanings from isolated parts #HDLS14 #Structuralism is #200andLATE

@ryanlepic building on approaches like in @adelegoldberg1 2006, etc; we assume that constructions vary in size and complexity, but they don’t differ categorically based on the size of the unit #HDLS14

@ryanlepic has spent most of his time on word-level constructions, but now (and also with @ErinWilkinson and @linasigns!) he’s moving into larger multiword expressions — maybe one day he will come all the way over here to constituent order???? ehhh??? #HDLS14

@ryanlepic when we have subsign units which have meaning extracted over full signs as pairings of meaning and form, as in depicting constructions, we can just think of this as good ol’ morphology! #EverythingIsMorphology (<-that’s my addition) #HDLS14

the chat is full of love for @ryanlepic 😍🥰🎉

BACK TO ROPE! (i forgot to tweet that we started here, much like a braided rope, the strands of the talk have curled back here...i’ve lost the thread...) #HDLS14

@ryanlepic back to his roots: initialized signs in ASL! the R handshape in “rope” can represent SHAPE, the English letter R, or BOTH! with sign schemas, we don’t have to choose, and from a usage based approach, we care about what individuals’ knowledge & use patterns #HDLS14

the convo is already 🔥 in the chat! lots of chat about how ideologies of language-belonging shape patterns of use of certain handshapes (@ryanlepic and I presented on this at #ICCG in 2018!) #HDLS14

great meetings of the minds and collabs being planned in the chat, as folks ask how they can incorporate sign schemas into lexical databases! hope to learn about that at #HDLS15 (and beyond!)

@jahochcam and @ryanlepic are now colleagues, and we’re seeing some of the emergent plans to figure out how to use this work to inform how we “write stuff down”! (lots of challenges! but important!) #HDLS14

@AdamCSchembri suggests an ASL ConstructionBank! 🎉

@ErinWilkinson and @ryanlepic plotting how to make an ASL corpus which takes the assumption of usage-based approaches into account (take note, @NSF)