Kate Davidson invited to speak at SULA 8 in Vancouver

This weekend, cognitive science postdoc Kate Davidson will be featured as an invited speaker at Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas (SULA) 8 at the University of British Columbia. Her talk, titled “The structure of alternatives in sign languages,” focuses on two pragmatic phenomena in American Sign Language (ASL): verum focus and domain widening, which have both been analyzed as simply “emphatic” in previous literature. In both of these constructions, the means employed by ASL for expressing both of these appear to be found in more than one (unrelated to ASL) sign language, yet are not obviously iconic. Kate will present new analyses for both phenomena that try to capture the relationship between typical cross-linguistic variation and variation that might be due to the language modality (sign vs. spoken vs. written). She will also discuss how research from understudied spoken languages can shed light on this question.