Making Referents Seen and Heard

: Comparing Constructed Action Practices in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language) and Belgian French

Résumé

This dissertation compares constructed action, often called ‘personal transfer’ in the French-speaking scientific literature, in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) and in Belgian French. Long acknowledged as a key component in signed languages, constructed action has often been described as a peripheral strategy in spoken languages. Recent studies have focused on the empirical study of signed and spoken languages in a comparative semiotic approach. This dissertation contributes to this endeavour by using the LSFB and FRAPé corpora, two directly comparable video datasets of semi-structured dyadic interactions in LSFB and Belgian French. Constructed action is studied in these corpora within a conversational task on language attitudes and a narrative task performed by ten members of each language community. Three aspects of the phenomenon are systematically annotated and compared: the frequency of use of constructed action, the contribution and coordination of different bodily articulators and/or of voice, and the distribution of different degrees of constructed action. Taken together, these measures provide complementary indices of similitudes and differences in the functions and forms of constructed action in the discourse of both studied communities. The observed results are interpreted by means of a broad set of causal mechanisms, notably appealing to explanations of articulatory, social-interactional, and diachronic nature.

la date de réponse	7 oct. 2024
langue originale	Anglais
L'institution diplômante	Universite de Namur
Sponsors	FRS FNRS
Superviseur	Laurence Meurant (Promoteur), Philippe De Brabanter (Copromoteur), Lieven Vandelanotte (Président), Darren Saunders (Jury) & Gabrielle Hodge (Jury)