introduction

Contrasting signed and spoken languages

Towards a renewed perspective on language

Sílvia Gabarró-López1, 2 and Laurence Meurant2

1
Stockholm University (Sweden) | 2 University of Namur (Belgium)

For years, the study of spoken languages, on the basis of written and then
also oral productions, was the only way to investigate the human language
capacity. As an introduction to this first volume of Languages in Contrast
devoted to the comparison of spoken and signed languages, we propose to
look at the reasons for the late emergence of the consideration of signed
languages and multimodality in language studies. Next, the main stages of
the history of sign language research are summarized. We highlight the
benefits of studying cross-modal and multimodal data, as opposed to the
isolated investigation of signed or spoken languages, and point out the
remaining methodological obstacles to this approach. This
contextualization prefaces the presentation of the outline of the volume.

Keywords: sign language linguistics, gesture studies, multimodality, signed/

spoken languages, corpora, contrastive studies

1. Language, gesture and sign

If we ask a member of the general public what language is, they may answer that
language is what is spoken. As limited as this answer may sound nowadays, this
idea has been considered the defining feature of language by many scholars for a
long time (Dresher and van der Hulst, to appear). As Kendon (2010: 48) puts it:

From Saussure onwards, linguists have almost always defined language in struc-
tural terms, and until the advent of studies of primary sign languages, it was almost
always assumed that ‘language’ must be spoken to be ‘language’. As a consequence,
very many writers use the words ‘language’ and ‘speech’ interchangeably.

This approach to language is still widespread among the general public, and even
accepted by some linguists.

https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00024.gab | Published online: 23 August 2022

Languages in Contrast 22:2 (2022), pp. 169–194. ISSN 1387-6759 | E‑ISSN 1569-9897
Available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. © John Benjamins Publishing Company
170 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

1.1 A delayed revolution

Since the 1960s, two major discoveries have marked the field of linguistics. On the
one hand, following Stokoe’s (1960) seminal work on the structure of ASL (Ameri-
can Sign Language), it became clear that language was not only made up of vocally
produced and audibly perceived languages. On the other hand, the development
of discourse studies has highlighted, since the 1980s (Gumperz, 1982; Levinson,
1983; Kendon, 1986), that language use in interaction involves much more than
strings of words. The status of gestural expression, in connection with what is said
or even as an autonomous language system, became a subject of discussion, sup-
ported by the hypothesis of the gestural origin of language (Hockett, 1978). These
two breakthroughs had the potential to fundamentally redefine the perimeter of
what is considered language, and thus also the object and approaches of linguis-
tics. However, it is obvious 60 years later that this revolution has been contained
and delayed. Among the factors that hindered it, we will point to three.
The first one has to do with the history and legitimation of linguistics itself.
The construction of linguistics as a scientific discipline at the beginning of the
20th century had as a corollary that language was mainly approached as a formal
system, by highlighting the properties of languages that illustrate the abstract and
economic character of such a system. From this perspective, the level of phono-
logical analysis appeared to be exemplary and largely contributed to the construc-
tion of modern linguistics. Relying largely on written examples and samples —
rarely from spontaneous productions — and on Indo-European languages, lin-
guistics has essentially focused on the arbitrary and conventional components of
language, at the levels of lexicon, morphology and syntax. This prevalent ten-
dency has extended to the study of signed languages, which served in particular
to test and illustrate the models of formal linguistics. In this context, gesture in
general and aspects of simultaneity, iconicity and the use of space in signed lan-
guages, have long been regarded as non-linguistic phenomena (or, in the case of
gestures, as paralinguistic and subordinate to speech) and have been disregarded
by linguists. This restrictive approach to language, from which all kinesic actions
are excluded (Kendon, 2010), has largely contributed to the fact that studies of
spoken languages, signed languages and gesture have developed separately, rather
than reforming language methods and knowledge together.
This leads to the second obstacle, which relates to the context in which signed
languages have emerged on the linguistic scene. Despite the impact of Stokoe’s
(1960) publication, signed languages have long continued to struggle to be con-
sidered natural languages. Scholars first had to counter numerous misconceptions
about signed languages, while also having to provide evidence about their lin-
guistic status. Signed languages have long been considered an inferior communi-
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 171

cation system, pantomime, or a simple gestural transcoding of spoken languages

that follows the conventions of speech. Other generally spread, even incompati-
ble misconceptions about signed languages include the belief in the existence of
one universal sign language, the existence of one signed language per country, or
the idea that signed languages are naturally limited in terms of the meaning they
can convey. The underlying idea that nourished those misbeliefs in some circles,
which was reinforced by the existence of motivated, iconic gestures, is that for not
being spoken, signed languages do not share the abstraction of spoken languages,
first of all at the level of phonology. Pressed by the urgency of restoring the place
of signed languages in the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and
thus to have them recognized as fully-fledged languages, researchers have sought
to highlight the analogies between signed languages and spoken languages in
terms of their organization and grammatical functioning (Vermeerbergen, 2006;
see also Section 2). One of the effects of this search for compatibility with spoken
languages is that, rather than stimulating a new way of conceiving and under-
standing language, the specificities of signed languages have been downplayed or
even ignored. As Kendon (2014: 2) claims, the efforts to minimize or ignore the
expressive and iconic components of signed languages were related to the ideo-
logical valorization of what is “truly linguistic”, i.e. formal and systemic, vs. what is
less so. Therefore, in the first development of the field after Stokoe’s (1960) work,
the assimilation of signed languages with gesture, which was still essentially rele-
gated to non-linguistic domains, may have been perceived as a threat for the legit-
imation of signed languages.
The third obstacle to the inclusion of signed languages and gesture in lan-
guage studies comes from the limitations of the data available for research. Just
as the study of oral language was only able to develop and enrich the field of
linguistic knowledge when sound recording techniques became widespread, the
opening-up of the study of language to the analysis of visual-gestural productions
has been and still is dependent on the possibility of filming, recording and archiv-
ing audiovisual data. The use of these data by researchers is also subject to the
pre-processing that is implied. The transcription and segmentation of produc-
tions, which are essential preliminary steps, are still mostly done manually, and
are therefore time-consuming and difficult to finance. Although linguists’ efforts
to collect video corpora of language interaction (in spoken and signed languages)
have multiplied since the end of the 2000s (see Section 2.2), the multimodal data
available remain infinitely less numerous than written and oral data. Because of
this low visibility and limited availability, the challenges of taking into account
visual-gestural and multimodal components in the description and modelling of
language may have remained on the margins of many linguists’ concerns. It can
only be noted that the amount of research including gesture and signed languages
172 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

remains limited today if compared to the whole body of research on (written and
oral) spoken language.

1.2 A new agenda

From the mid 1980s onwards, scholars have shown that spoken linguistic expres-
sion is intimately related to gestural expression (McNeill, 1992), and even that ges-
ture can enlighten the nature of thought and utterance production as well as the
processes that have given rise to the formal properties of language (Kendon, 1986).
The relation of bodily actions (gestures, gaze, postures, body movements) to lan-
guage and communication has been the object of interdisciplinary research (see
Müller et al., 2013, 2014, for an overview of the theoretical and methodological
grounds of this field, as well as of the current understanding of forms, functions of
bodily movements across cultures and their intertwining with language and com-
munication). In the vein of Peirce’s (1955) semiotics and its development in Clark
(1996), it is now increasingly accepted that communicative practices are the prod-
uct of composite utterances (Enfield, 2009) that consist of several semiotically
different expressive modalities, and not exclusively of symbolic signs and struc-
tures whose meanings are determined by social convention. In discourse, mean-
ing production results from three different modes of reference, signalled by acts
of describing, indicating and depicting (Clark, 1996, 2016). Building on Clark’s
theory, Ferrara and Hodge (2018) demonstrate that description, indication and
depiction combine both in signed and in spoken language interactions (see Meu-
rant et al., this volume, for an application of this idea to the topic of reformula-
tion).
The joint and comparative study of spoken and signed languages opens up
new avenues towards a more holistic understanding of language. It paves the way
to new possibilities for understanding the different ways in which language activ-
ity is embodied according to the channels, articulators, modalities and senses that
are available to the interactants (Perniss, 2018). We still know very little about how
the communicative semiotic practices of signers and speakers compare (Müller,
2018; Ferrara and Hodge, 2018).
In order to advance this agenda, systematic crosslinguistic research encom-
passing multimodal data from speakers and signers of different languages needs to
be conducted. This special issue aims to contribute to this endeavour by address-
ing different linguistic phenomena through the comparison of spoken and signed
language pairs. Although our approach is to compare them on a par, we devote a
part of this introduction to give some background about sign language linguistics
(see Section 2), which may remain unknown for many readers, by summarising
the stages of the history of sign language linguistics. Afterwards, we discuss the
importance of studying signed and spoken language, as well as the methodolog-
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 173

ical obstacles that explain why spoken vs. signed language comparative studies
have not been developed before (Section 3). The last part of the paper is devoted
to the outline of the volume (Section 4) and shows how the five studies that make
up this special issue contribute to the largely unexplored field of signed vs. spoken
contrastive (and corpus-based) linguistics.

2. Sign language linguistics

After being long ignored in the scientific sphere, signed languages attracted the
interest of a few pioneering researchers. Bernard Tervoort’s (1953) dissertation
was the first research devoted to the study of signed language structure, in partic-
ular, of Dutch deaf children’s productions. This breakthrough study has however
received limited international recognition, so that Tervoort’s name has remained
relatively unknown in the history of the field. During the same period, an anthro-
pologist called La Mont West wrote a dissertation about the difference between
one-handed and two-handed signs in PISL (Northern America “Plains Indian
Sign Language”) (West, 1960). His work not only inspired some later scholars
working on the phonology of ASL, but it also anticipated many present insights
about signed languages. Despite his important contribution, West’s dissertation
was not known by other scholars of his time let alone by many sign language
researchers at present (van der Hulst, to appear). William Stokoe is generally con-
sidered as the first scholar to have provided evidence about the linguistic sta-
tus of sign languages. In line with the submorphemic segmentation hypothesis of
West, which Stokoe discovered afterwards, he showed that the signs of ASL can
be broken down into meaningless components (location, handshape and move-
ment) just as words can be broken down into phonemes (Stokoe, 1960). After this
ground-breaking publication, the field has seen how scholars from other disci-
plines such as psycholinguists, psychologists, theoretical linguists, computational
linguists, sociolinguists and many others have become interested and directed
their investigations towards signed languages.

2.1 Stages of history of sign language research

The field of sign language linguistics has evolved rapidly. Its theoretical objectives
as well as its ideological intentions have changed over time and could be roughly
divided into three periods (cf. Vermeerbergen and Nilsson, 2018).1 The first

1. This division into three periods does not imply that all publications on sign language lin-
guistics follow the predominant theoretical objective of their time. Note also that there are con-
temporary books cited in what follows that synthesize previous works from the other periods.
174 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

period, also called the “modern period” (Woll, 2003), begins in the middle of the
last century. Because of the existing prejudices and misconceptions about signed
languages, researchers had to provide evidence about their linguistic status by
showing that despite the modality, signed languages shared most features that
have been identified in spoken languages (Vermeerbergen, 2006). After Stokoe’s
(1960) contribution, several studies followed showing that not only do signed lan-
guages have a phonological structure, but they also have a morphosyntactic struc-
ture as spoken languages do (Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Sandler and Lillo-Martin,
2006). As explained above (Section 1), the researchers’ approach was dominated
by the endeavour to highlight the similarities between signed and spoken lan-
guages. Specific aspects such as the use of space, iconicity and simultaneity were
minimized, or interpreted as surface differences informed by the same, highly
rule-governed underlying structures as the ones described in spoken languages
(Vermeerbergen and Nilsson, 2018). Research was mostly focused on ASL at that
time, although some scholars, mainly from Europe, started to study their regional
signed languages.
The second period or “post-modern period” (Perniss et al., 2007) starts in the
1980s. In reaction to the previous trend, scholars focused on the specificities of
the signed modality, and iconicity was given an important place in their works.
They considered that theories, categories, terminologies and other linguistic tools
developed by and for the description of spoken languages were not appropriate
for describing the uniqueness of signed languages. This position resulted in a sign-
language-specific approach (Vermeerbergen, 2006). Research expanded to other
signed languages and saw a growth in the number of publications. Because of the
incipient knowledge of some signed languages (mainly from the United States,
Australia and Eastern Europe), signed languages were thought to be typologi-
cally more alike than spoken languages. The areas that were mostly explored were
phonology, including phonetics and prosody, and morphosyntax (see Baker et al.,
2016, for a synthesis and the most relevant references). Discourse studies would
come later, more or less at the time of the third period in the history of sign lan-
guage linguistics, when appropriate data became available.
The third period starts at the end of the 1990s. It is characterized by an
increasing interest in sign language typology (e.g., Zeshan, 2004a, 2004b). Non-
Western signed languages were added to the picture and their study revealed
that signed languages might not be as typologically homogeneous as it was once
thought (Perniss et al., 2007). Research on the use of gesture combined with signs
(e.g., Schembri, 2003; Liddell, 2003) and the first comparisons of signed and spo-
ken languages (e.g., Baker et al. 2003; Vermeerbergen and Demey, 2007) came on
the scene.
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 175

In comparison with the field of spoken language contrastive linguistics which

experienced a revival in the same period thanks to the availability of large compa-
rable corpora (Hasselgård, 2020), only small datasets were available to compare
the productions of speakers and signers. The collection of the first modern signed
language corpora started in 2004, which was itself a milestone in the field.

2.2 Corpus-based linguistics

After a period during which generative approaches were prevalent, the field has
now broadened and different frameworks co-exist including rule-based, meaning-
based and usage-based approaches (Vermeerbergen and Nilsson, 2018). There is
also a growing interest in studying actual language use instead of elicited exam-
ples, which has become possible thanks to the collection of videotaped sign lan-
guage data into (large-scale) corpora.
The sociolinguistic investigation of ASL, and especially studies on language
contact in the American Deaf Community (Lucas and Valli, 1992; Lucas et al.,
2001; Quinto-Pozos, 2002), gave rise to the first large collections of natural sign
language productions. The advent of new technologies has played a key role in
the development of modern signed language corpora, that is, “a finite-size body
of machine-readable text, sampled in order to be maximally representative of the
language variety under consideration” (McEnery and Wilson, 2001: 32). At pre-
sent, vast amounts of data can be stored in servers and made accessible online,
and their content can be annotated in a machine-readable format, which allows
for automatic search through the database.
The first projects aimed at collecting a machine-readable reference corpus
for their national signed language, combining data, annotation and often trans-
lation, took place in Australia and Ireland. These initiatives were then followed
by European countries such as The Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, and the
United Kingdom. Nowadays, the list of countries is longer and includes not only
other countries from Europe but also countries from other continents such as
Asia and Africa (see Konrad, 2012).2 Thanks to software like ELAN (Sloetjes and
Wittenburg, 2008) or iLex (Hanke et al., 2010) the video data of such corpora are
time-aligned with the annotations of the manual activity and, more often than
not, the translation into written spoken language, both of which are considered
the two stages of “basic annotation” (Johnston, 2016). Manual signs are anno-
tated with ID-glosses, which are written labels (usually using the ambient spo-
ken language) that are consistently used to identify signs (more precisely, lemma)

2. Although several corpus projects have started since the publication of the results of Konrad’s
(2012) survey, this remains, to the best of our knowledge, the most updated list.
176 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

throughout the corpus, regardless of their meaning in the context (Johnston,

2010). The basic annotation is followed by an “additional detailed annotation”
including non-manual behaviour and clause-like units (Johnston, 2016) (see
Figure 1). At present, sign language corpora projects are at some point in this pri-
mary processing stage. Johnston (2016) proposes secondary and tertiary process-
ing which include POS-tagging, clause-related tagging, syntactic relations, etc.
Since the annotation of signed language is so time-consuming, getting through the
different stages of annotation may still take years.

Figure 1. Screenshot of an ELAN file from the LSFB Corpus containing basic and
additional detailed annotation

3. Spoken and signed language contrastive studies

Given the context in which the field of sign language linguistics has emerged and
evolved over the past sixty years (see Section 2), the comparison of signed lan-
guages with spoken languages was hardly an object of study in its own right dur-
ing the first periods of the discipline. Rather, it has essentially been used and
directed to serve the theoretical intentions or pragmatic necessities underlying the
researchers’ search for legitimacy for signed languages and their field of research.
During the first period of the history of signed language research (see
Section 2.1), the comparison served to prove the linguistic status of the signed lan-
guages, and was therefore reduced to those aspects which reflected the known
features of the spoken languages. These common features and their systematicity
may have been overestimated or amplified, such as the morphological system of
aspect in ASL (Klima and Bellugi, 1979), to the neglect of the more expressive
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 177

and iconic features of the language. When the pendulum swung back, in the sec-
ond period of the history of the field, the most visible specificities of signed lan-
guages, such as the way they use space, simultaneity and iconicity, were given
major importance in the description, and all the more so as they were the most
compelling aspects to support the idea of the irreducibility of signed languages to
spoken languages. In this effort to emphasize the uniqueness of signed languages,
the comparative approach with spoken languages was declared to be vain and
impossible.

3.1 The shortcoming of studying signed vs. spoken languages separately

Over time, this quest to prove either that signed and spoken languages are essen-
tially similar, or that they are so different that they cannot be compared, has
deprived linguistics of the opportunity to revisit its mainstream models, to pro-
vide them with a broader validity and to contribute to a more comprehensive
description of language uses across modalities and cultures. Indeed, the divide
between the domains of signed and spoken language research tends to emphasize
the opposition between the formal system of language, primarily associated with
spoken language, and the gradient or depictive forms of expression that have been
claimed to be sign-specific. However, like signers, speakers can and do produce
simultaneous structures (e.g., speaking and gesturing at the same time or using
both hands at the same time), rely on iconicity (e.g., to represent the shape and
size of objects with their hands and/or with voice modulations) and use space
(e.g., to locate referents or draw paths) (Kendon, 2014).
The isolated investigation of signed vs. spoken language makes linguistics
too short-sighted to the fundamentally heterogeneous nature of the systems and
the semiotic resources through which speakers and signers convey meaning
(Johnston et al., 2007; Kendon, 2014). What these systems are, how they inter-
relate, how they are embodied and distributed across channels and articulators,
what functions they have and how they compare in spoken and signed interac-
tions, still remain mostly unexplored.
A comprehensive description of language use should rather be able to identify
and elaborate on the similarities and differences in the way speakers and signers
make use of space, iconicity and simultaneity and how these components are
interwoven with the systematic and formal components of language. The fun-
damental condition for conducting such a comparison is also that which most
promises to reshape and renew our knowledge of language and linguistic prac-
tices: namely the requirement to approach both signed and spoken language pro-
ductions as primarily multi-channel activities (Vermeerbergen and Demey, 2007).
This can be illustrated with the topics that are tackled in this volume, namely the
178 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

expression of viewpoint, the conversational use of holds and the process of refor-
mulation.
The expression of a character’s perspective or viewpoint was first extensively
investigated in written productions as a major object of narratology (Niederhoff,
2013) and enunciative linguistics (Benveniste, 1966). Viewpoint is known to mani-
fest across a large variety of lexical, morphological and syntactic markers, includ-
ing person pronouns, verb tense and aspect (Ducrot, 1984). Afterwards, however,
the consideration of oral and then multimodal data revealed that those lexico-
grammatical markers of viewpoint are supported not only by prosody (Auchlin
et al., 2004), but also by a nonrandom use of visible and bodily actions, through
which the specific viewpoint is depicted and enacted. The broadening of the
research approach to the whole range of articulators involved and to the variety of
semiotic resources mobilized in the construction of meaning has greatly enriched
our knowledge of the phenomenon of point of view in spoken language and
in discourse (Dancygier and Sweetser, 2012). Remarkably, it is also a subject
that has already given rise to comparative work between signed and spoken
language. Enactment, i.e. partial demonstration of behaviour, either linguistic
(as constructed dialogue) or non-linguistic (as constructed action) (Ferrara and
Johnston, 2014: 197), has been recognized as frequent in both signed and spoken
languages. It has particularly been found in narratives and in contexts of reported
speech in both modalities, even though it is more pervasive in sign languages
(Earis and Cormier, 2013; Quinto-Pozos and Parrill, 2015). However, there is a lot
more to study in order to understand how depictive enactment is intertwined with
the grammatical markers and structures and how these intertwining systems, or
semiotic resources, engage the various articulators, channels and senses that are
available to the interlocutors, both in signed and spoken productions.
The analysis of oral discourse has led to the recognition of two types of pauses
in speech, namely empty pauses and filled pauses. Empty pauses correspond to
an interruption of the signal (a silence), whereas filled pauses are manifested by
the production of a sound (e.g., uhm) that ‘fills’ this linguistic void. The compari-
son of spoken and signed languages, however, forces us to realize that, by focusing
on the oral channel, spoken language linguistics has overestimated the ‘emptiness’
of the empty pauses (Notarrigo, 2017). Speakers indeed, just as signers, rely on
manual movements and holds in order to manage discourse and conversation,
including during interruptions of the speech flow. The study of these fundamen-
tal interactional devices certainly gains in sharpness and robustness if it takes into
account the multiplicity of articulators brought into play in the linguistic activ-
ity, and if it is based on the comparison of the ways they are used by signers and
speakers.
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 179

Reformulation is a ubiquitous phenomenon that ensures the progression of

discourse by relying on redundancy: an utterance is formulated first, and then
said otherwise. The principle of reformulation is historically as well as theoreti-
cally related to the concept of paraphrase and therefore has essentially been con-
ceived as a linear phenomenon, primarily explored through written texts: the first
formulation precedes its re-formulation, a reformulation marker often making the
reformulation structure explicit. When looking at signed productions, it appears
that signers often combine lexical and grammatical forms with more iconic and
depictive devices when they reformulate (Cuxac, 2007; Meurant and Sinte, 2016):
they not only say but also show with their hands, body, gaze, head and face, what
they are reformulating. Rather than concluding that this intertwining of semiotic
resources and this combination of articulators is specific to signed language, it is
much more revealing to turn to the multi-channel composition of the spoken pro-
ductions, including the manual and non-manual movements that simultaneously
contribute to the reformulation effort of the speaker. This approach facilitates a
more holistic understanding of the concept of reformulation and of the contri-
bution of the heterogeneous systems of meaning-making in signers’ and speak-
ers’ discourse. It has already highlighted how adult-child interaction and teaching
discourse is fundamentally organized on multi-channel and pluri-semiotic struc-
tures of reformulation (Rabatel, 2010).

3.2 Conducting (spoken vs. signed) contrastive studies on the basis of

comparable multimodal data

As mentioned above, in the innovative power of taking multimodality into

account also lies the main impediment to the development of spoken and signed
language contrastive studies, namely the availability of data. This explains why the
amount of spoken vs. signed studies remains scarce in comparison with the stud-
ies involving only spoken languages.
Contrastive studies involve the use of parallel and comparable corpora. The
former is defined as “a collection of texts in one language and their transla-
tions into one or more languages” (Granger and Lefer, 2020: 167). Following
Johansson (2007), the same authors define comparable corpora as “[multilingual]
corpora that are compiled according to the same sampling method and are
therefore matched in terms of register, domain, period, etc.” (Granger and Lefer
2020: 167). At present, parallel and comparable spoken language corpora of writ-
ten data have been available for a while (e.g., Frankenberg-Garcia and Santos,
2003; Hansen-Schirra et al., 2012), whereas comparable corpora of unimodal oral
spoken language data have only recently begun to be compiled (e.g., Xiao and
McEnery, 2010; Crible, 2019). These corpora have not only allowed the develop-
180 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

ment of unimodal contrastive studies, but they have also allowed the comparison
between written spoken language and oral spoken language (e.g., Thuilier, 2013;
Kunz and Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2015) and between spoken language in its oral
modality with signed language (Crible and Gabarró-López, 2021).
In spite of these advancements, the collection of multimodal spoken language
corpora is not an extended practice yet (e.g., Paggio et al., 2010; Brône and
Oben, 2015; Hunyadi et al., 2018). As for signed languages, there are an increasing
number of sign language corpus projects which are becoming a reality (see
Section 2.2). However, these projects aim to document these endangered lan-
guages and to carry out corpus-based language descriptions (Hodge et al., 2019).
That is, with a few exceptions (Hodge et al., 2019; Meurant et al., ongoing), they
have not been designed to compare a given signed language with its ambient spo-
ken language.
Pioneering studies comparing signed and multimodal spoken data have been
developed since the 2010s (Barberà and Zwets, 2013; Earis and Cormier, 2013;
Quinto-Pozos and Parrill, 2015; Shaw, 2018; Fenlon et al., 2019). To that end,
authors have used different solutions to gather their data: data have been collected
especially for the purpose of the study (Earis and Cormier, 2013; Shaw, 2018); new
signed data have been recorded in order to complement an existing sample of
spoken language (Quinto-Pozos and Parrill, 2015); data extracted from an existing
sign language corpus have been compared to an existing multimodal corpus of its
ambient spoken language (Barberà and Zwets, 2013); or data from an existing sign
language corpus have been compared to publicly available videos of spoken lan-
guage (Fenlon et al., 2019).
The main issue with most comparative multimodal studies to date is the com-
parability of the recording conditions and the tasks (Granger and Lefer, 2020: 167;
McEnery and Hardie, 2012; Hodge et al., 2019). In order to achieve direct compa-
rability, the Marqspat project, in a ground-breaking manner, collected narratives
produced in four languages, namely LSQ (Quebec Sign Language), ASL, English
and French. All participants were exposed to the same video sketches and to the
same recording conditions. Three distinct technological systems were combined
for the recordings, namely a digital camera, a motion tracking system and an eye
and facial movement tracking system (Parisot et al., 2008; Parisot and Saunders,
this volume). For the same purpose of comparability, two projects are currently
developing multimodal comparable corpora of speakers and signers that would
enable the investigation of a large range of linguistic topics. The Auslan (Aus-
tralian Sign Language) and Australian English Archive and Corpus (Hodge et al.,
2019) contains signed data produced by five pairs of deaf Auslan signers and spo-
ken data produced by five pairs of non-signing hearing Australian English speak-
ers equivalent in terms of age and gender. Deaf and hearing participants were
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 181

asked to perform five tasks while they were being filmed (approximately 90 min-
utes of recordings for each pair). Another multimodal comparable corpus project
is being developed in French-speaking Belgium (Meurant et al., submitted). The
Corpus de Français Parlé (FRAPé Corpus) (Meurant et al., ongoing) is a corpus
of multimodal spoken Belgian French. This corpus is being collected following
the same battery of tasks and the same recording conditions as the LSFB (French
Belgian Sign Language) Corpus (Meurant, 2015). The ongoing FRAPé Corpus
includes 10 pairs of hearing non-signing speakers to date, with the aim of increas-
ing this number to 50 pairs.
These initiatives still have a long way to go to equal existing unimodal com-
parable corpora. Comparable corpora of written data have large amounts of data
which are extensively annotated at different linguistic levels. By contrast, multi-
modal comparable corpora are still in the preliminary stages of annotation, that
is, the transcription of data. This difference is not only due to the youth of mul-
timodal comparable corpora but also by the slow pace of the fully manual job
of annotating multimodal data. Therefore, it is not possible yet to utilize large
collections of natural texts that are mined using both quantitative and qualita-
tive analytical techniques (Hasselgård, 2020). This means that studies which draw
on these large-scale comparable corpora (e.g., Parisot and Saunders, this volume;
Lepeut, this volume; Meurant et al., this volume) are still limited to a few signers
and speakers and to a restricted number of discourse genres.
The development of multimodal datasets of spoken and signed languages and
of contrastive corpus-based studies not only meet the need of “[widening] the
range of languages” in this field (Johansson, 2012: 64, cited in Hasselgård, 2020)
but also the challenge of having a more inclusive society in which the languages
used by Deaf Communities are put on the same level as the languages used by the
hearing majority. Multimodal corpora are “an invaluable source of cross-linguistic
and cross-cultural information” (Hasselgård, 2020: 201), that is, they do not only
provide us with insights about the language but also about the different cultural
norms that guide social interactions in two communities that share the same
territory. Finally, multimodal corpora and the contrastive approach “can lead us
beyond what we knew or did not see so clearly” (Johansson, 2012: 65).
The development of contrastive studies between signed and spoken languages
might have as significant an impact in the coming decades as the development
of oral data has had on language knowledge since the 1980s. This volume aims
to illustrate how studying spoken and signed language comparatively, rather than
separately, opens new avenues for a renewed and more holistic perspective on lan-
guage and language use.
182 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

4. Outline of the volume

This is the first special issue of Languages in Contrast which is devoted to con-
trastive signed and spoken language research.3 Our volume consists of five papers
which compare the signed language used in a country or a region with the ambi-
ent spoken language (see Table 1). All in all, we have three signed languages: ASL,
LSQ and LSFB, and two spoken languages: English (from different countries) and
two varieties of French (from Quebec and from Belgium). Despite broadly shared
misconceptions, signed languages do not respect country borders and are not ges-
tural copies of their ambient spoken language (see Section 1.1). ASL is used in the
United States and in Canada, whereas LSQ is only used in Quebec and LSFB in
French-speaking Belgium. Although these last two signed languages are used in
French-speaking regions, they have a different lexicon and different morphosyn-
tactic properties.

Table 1. Summary of the main details of the papers that appear in this special issue
Country or
Authors Languages region Type of data
Quinto-Pozos, ASL and United States Narratives elicited from video stimuli
Parrill and Coons English
Janzen ASL and Canada Narratives embedded in conversations and
English narratives from a video blog
Parisot and LSQ and Quebec Narrative and descriptive productions of
Saunders French the Marqspat Corpus
Lepeut LSFB and French- LSFB Corpus, FRAPé Corpus and
French speaking CorpAGEst
Belgium
Meurant, Sinte and LSFB and French- LSFB Corpus, FRAPé Corpus and
Gabarró-López French speaking CorMILS
Belgium

All papers tackle aspects of signed and spoken discourse. They investigate
three kinds of phenomena: enactment (see Section 3.1), sign and gesture holds,
and reformulation structures. Based on the types of data that are compared, the
papers can be roughly divided into three groups. On the one hand, the first

3. Prior to this volume, one paper was published comparing additive relations in LSFB and
spoken French (Crible and Gabarró-López, 2021), but no multimodal data was used for the lat-
ter language.
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 183

two papers analyse datasets of (mostly) monological narratives which were col-
lected for the purpose of studying multimodal language. On the other hand, the
last two papers draw on dialogical narrative, argumentative and explanatory data
extracted from two of the comparable corpora presented in the previous section,
namely the LSFB Corpus and the FRAPé Corpus. Additionally, these two papers
use data from a third corpus in order to supplement their results. The third arti-
cle lies between those two groups: it uses monolingual narrative and descriptive
discourses from the large-scale and multilingual (LSQ, ASL, English and French)
Marqspat corpus.
The first three papers presented in Table 1 shed a comparative light on enact-
ment, and more precisely on the processes by which the internal viewpoint of a
character is expressed in signed and spoken language. Both signers and speakers
engage bodily enactments when they are using language and producing meaning.
In signed languages, signers can use their face, head, body, hands, and/or other
non-manual cues to represent the actions, utterances, thoughts, feelings and/or
attitudes of a referent. These enactment phenomena are referred to as constructed
actions (Metzger, 1995), role shift (Padden, 1986), referential shift (Engberg-
Pedersen, 1993; Emmorey, 2002), point of view predicate (Lillo-Martin, 1995),
or perspective shift (Janzen, 2004) in the signed language literature. They corre-
spond to what happens in spoken language when speakers use words, non-lexical
sounds and visible gestures in order to represent dialogues, thoughts, actions and/
or feelings of referents (Clark and Gerrig, 1990; Tannen, 1995; Streeck, 2002;
De Brabanter, 2010). The change from an external to an internal perspective has
been studied in spoken language linguistics as perspective change (Kendon, 2004;
Parrill, 2010) and co-verbal gesturing used along with this phenomenon is consid-
ered “character viewpoint gestures” (Bressem et al., 2018).
David Quinto-Pozos, Fey Parrill and Caitie Coons compare data of Amer-
ican deaf users of ASL and hearing speakers of English in order to investigate
how gestural material interfaces with linguistic grammar across language modal-
ities. Character viewpoint gestures (CVPT), when they accompany spoken lan-
guage, have been described as co-occurring with verbal predicates. In signed
narratives, constructed actions (CA) co-occur or alternate with lexical material
and with classifiers, functioning as a predicate and its argument(s). Both in speak-
ers and signers, the regularity and the frequency of use of CVPT and CA as well
as the degree to which they engage enactment has been described as variable. The
authors examine these statements and the comparison of CVPT and CA accord-
ing to their relation to syntax, by comparing videotaped retellings of short films
by both signers and speakers. They hypothesize that signers might engage CA
comparatively more than co-speech gesturers utilize CVPT in their retellings of
video-based stimuli, because CA frequently function on their own and as entire
184 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

syntactic constituents. This study also investigates the factors that influence the
production of bodily enactment by speakers and signers and it examines the
degree to which co-speech gesturers and signers engage in their enactments. This
research offers a novel approach to this topic by using the concept of “gesture
threshold”, borrowed from the Gestures as Simulated Action (GSA) model
(Hostetter and Alibali, 2019). According to this model, the authors predict that,
because of the motor simulations that are engaged when watching someone act-
ing, this kind of stimuli lowers the gesture threshold or, in other words, fosters the
use of gesture. The results show several differences between speakers and sign-
ers: in terms of variation among participants of each group (all signers produce
enactments, but not all speakers), of frequency of enactments produced (more in
signers’ productions) as well as in terms of degree of engagement in the enact-
ment (signers produce more exaggerated enactments). But whether in spoken or
signed productions, the enactment seems to be guided by grammatical properties
of the language, even the grammatical contexts in which CA appear seem broader
than for CVPT gestures. The authors suggest that the frequent use of gestural
enactments alone in signed language, i.e. alternating (and not co-occurring) with
conventional signs, also contributes to lowering the gesture threshold for enact-
ment. Having become a way to provide very specific information about referents
in signed language, gestural enactments play the roles of syntactic structures and
share the responsibility of communication with conventional signs.
Terry Janzen compares the ways Canadian ASL signers and English speakers
make use of space to express the subjective viewpoint of a character. The study is
carried out within the framework of cognitive linguistics – resorting to the con-
cepts of “embodied cognition” (Evans and Green, 2006) and “embodied language”
(Gibbs, 2017) – which is particularly concerned with the synergies between lin-
guistic and gestural aspects of utterances. According to this framework, our con-
strual of reality, including viewpoint and intersubjectivity, is considered as shaped
by the nature of our bodies, and our communication as grounded in our bodily
experience. Analysing ASL and spoken multilingual English narrative produc-
tions, this study investigates how signers’ and speakers’ gestures, including verbal
and facial gestures, eye gaze, body stance and body orientation, reflect the use
of viewpointed space. The comparison also seeks to determine whether there
are differences between the two language modalities in their perspective-taking
system (MacWhinney, 2013). However, and this is the keystone of the study, the
author does not consider signed languages to be more embodied than spoken
languages because they involve hands, face, head and torso. Rather, in line with
Enfield’s (2009) view of “composite utterances” and multimodality, he assumes
that embodied language, and in particular the expression of viewpoint
(perspective-taking and stance-taking), draws on interactions among lexico-
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 185

syntactic structures and a large range of bodily gestures, both in signed and spo-
ken language. The scrutinized examples show similarities in the way signers and
speakers interact bodily with their gesture space, namely how their gesture space
is put into perspective. The way they position referents and actors in space, as well
as the way they orient their body reveals the taking of a specific (character’s or
signer’s/speaker’s) perspective on the described scene, the constructed action or
constructed speech. Moreover, both signed and spoken narratives show examples
of dual viewpoint gestures, namely the combination of a character and a narra-
tor viewpoint or the representation of two different characters at the same time.
Similarly, gestures, be they facial, manual or voice-quality-related gestures, convey
information about the signer’s or speaker’s stance, i.e. attitude or assessment of the
situation. This study demonstrates that visible (or auditory) gestures should cer-
tainly be taken into account among the range of viewpointing mechanisms that
reveal both speaker’s and signer’s construal. It illustrates that, when focusing on
the dynamicity of gestures and signs in action, rather than on singular gestures or
signs, the division between gestural and lexical components decreases.
The third paper devoted to enactment by Anne-Marie Parisot and Darren
Saunders echoes the conclusions of Terry Janzen’s paper. The authors examine
the grammatical and gestural marking of narrative perspective shifts in LSQ and
in French in comparable discursive contexts. Three LSQ signers and three Que-
bec French speakers were invited to watch and retell four video sketches with-
out words or signs. The four sketches represent two situations, namely a painter
painting a still-life scene and a fitting in a shoe store, each one being shown in
two versions: one with many lively interactions between characters (considered in
the study as ‘narrative’) and one showing the sequence of events in a neutral and
muted tone (considered as ‘descriptive’). The study investigates whether the dif-
ference between discursive type (narrative vs. descriptive) and the language (LSQ
vs. French) influence the duration, the frequency, the type and the distribution
of perspective shift markers in the collected productions, according to the nature
of the event being enacted (reported speech, thoughts, attitudes or actions). One
of the interests and originalities of this study lies in the four types of markers
that have been considered and systematically annotated for both languages: lex-
ical (e.g., lexical identification of a character, or expressions like she was like),
morphosyntactic (e.g., pronoun shift to first person, referential space shift), cor-
poral (e.g., body position of the character, character’s eye gaze, character’s voice)
and rhythmic markers (e.g., variation of speed of the hands, body and voice).
In line with the results of Quinto-Pozos et al. (this volume), the comparison of
LSQ and French data shows that character perspective is more present in the dis-
course of LSQ signers than of French speakers, and that the segments of character
perspective shift are longer in LSQ than in French. In both languages, narrative
186 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

discourse fosters a more frequent use of character perspective sequences than

descriptive discourse. The study highlights that corporal and prosodic markers
play a more important role in enactment than lexical and grammatical markers
both in signers’ and speakers’ productions. Moreover, the results show that each
language shows a specific distribution of the corporal markers. In both LSQ and
French, the head, body and eye gaze are extensively used. But, interestingly, the
use of hands to represent the hands of the character is more frequent in the French
speakers’ productions than in the signers’ discourses, while the opposite pattern
appears regarding the use of facial expressions. This study echoes that of Quinto-
Pozos et al. (this volume) in the fact that it highlights how the usual descriptions
of spoken languages, by not drawing on multimodal analyses and not mentioning
the multimodal characteristics of the expression of perspective shifts, overlook a
part of the characteristics of spoken discourse.
Alysson Lepeut deals with a phenomenon that has received scant attention
so far, both in signed and in spoken languages, i.e. the moments when hands are
momentarily stopped in a hold. This study not only compares manual holds based
on multimodal corpus data from a signed language, viz. LSFB and its ambient
spoken language, viz. French, but also breaks new ground in that it explores the
role of holds in the interactional practices of signers and speakers. While most lin-
guistic work considers manual movements to express referential content, in tight
connexion with speech and signing, the view adopted in this study, as called for by
Kendon (2014) and Müller (2018), is to investigate manual holds as a mechanism
contributing to the regulation of interaction. It shows how investigating a shared
interactive practice in a signed and a spoken language strengthens the position
for such phenomena to be part of language. The comparison is based on three
hours of video-recorded material drawn from three multimodal corpora of LSFB
and Belgian French discourses, namely the CorpAGEst Corpus (Bolly and Boutet,
2018), the LSFB Corpus (Meurant, 2015) and the ongoing FRAPé Corpus (see
Section 3.2). The studied sample gathers the productions of 12 participants, eight
in French and four in LSFB, in conversational tasks. The study reveals that both
signers and speakers use manual holds in order to signal their willingness to keep
the turn, notably while individually or collaboratively searching for a word, and
that they also hold their hands when seeking a reaction from their addressee. The
fine-grained analyses of the examples provided uncover the finely-tuned timing of
the interaction between the signer/speaker’s hold and the addressee’s response. In
other words, this study highlights how manual holds, such as other bodily behav-
iours, are neither performed nor released at random. Signers and speakers resort
to them in order to show their shared, online understanding of their interactional
conducts and to monitor the progress of interaction. These manual movements
work as recognizable visible actions (Kendon, 2004) that interactants rely on. This
 Contrasting signed and spoken languages 187

paper reinforces the argument for developing a new perspective upon the embod-
ied nature of language, extending beyond modality.
In the last paper, Laurence Meurant, Aurélie Sinte and Sílvia Gabarró-
López revisit the notion of reformulation from a contrastive and multimodal
perspective. Reformulation is a discourse phenomenon which consists of saying
something twice differently. Far from being useless or a shortcoming in discourse
proficiency, reformulation is pervasive and contributes to discourse coherence
and progression. Even more, as the authors show, it offers a window to the way
speakers process and adjust their expression in discourse. Therefore, it consti-
tutes an interesting standpoint to investigate and compare discourse in spoken
and signed language, as well to better understand the specificities of interpreting
between signed and spoken discourses. Reformulation has attracted the interest
of linguists since the emergence of pragmatics and the analysis of oral language
in the 1980s. So far, it has been studied mainly on the basis of written or oral
data. This article proposes to tackle the phenomenon of reformulation by com-
paring its uses in the productions of LSFB signers from the LSFB Corpus, of
French speakers from the FRAPé Corpus and of interpreters working between
those two languages from the CorMILS pilot project (Gabarró-López, 2018). The
study indicates that reformulation is prevalent both in spoken and signed face-
to-face communication. It also reveals that speakers and signers make extensive
use of the combination of description and depiction in their reformulations, even
if the presence of depiction is slightly more important in LSFB than in French.
However, some differences appear according to the manner in which signers and
speakers carry out reformulation: the distribution of the different articulators
across description and depiction differs, and the arrangement (simultaneous or
sequential) of the descriptive and depictive components offers more flexibility in
LSFB than in French. The data also highlight a different distribution of the fre-
quency of reformulations across genres in French and LSFB, which suggests that
some genres may elicit more reformulation effort in one language than in the
other. Interestingly, the study reveals that interpreters not only pay attention to
reformulation as a material to be interpreted, but they also use it as a means to
make their interpretation more idiolectal in the target language or to adjust their
production to the time and cognitive constraints of interpreting. Reformulation
structures appear to offer them a space for relief and adjustment. However, inter-
preters reformulate less than the speakers and the signers they interpret, and their
reformulations involve less depiction than those of speakers and signers. Overall,
this study shows that written and oral data only give partial access to what is at
work when we reformulate. On the contrary, reformulation turns out to be a mul-
timodal phenomenon, an interesting vantage point for studying the specificities
188 Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant

of signers’ and speakers’ language practices across discourse genres and for better
understanding the challenges of interpreting.

Funding

This work was supported by the FoSpråk Programme under Grant SU FV-2845-17 and by the
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS under Grant 1.B.181.22F (awarded to Sílvia Gabarró-
López) and n°J.0131.21 (awarded to Laurence Meurant).

Issue funding

The publication of this special issue was supported by the F.R.S-FNRS, the Belgian University
Foundation, the NaLTT research institute and the Department of French and Romance Lan-
guages and Literatures of the University of Namur.

Acknowledgements

All the articles in this volume went through a double open peer-review process by a fellow
contributor and by a scholar who did not participate in this special issue. We would like to
thank Lindsay Ferrara, Tommi Jantunen, Terry Janzen, Anne-Marie Parisot, Darren Saun-
ders, Eve Sweetser, Mieke Van Herreweghe and Amélie Voghel for the time devoted to provide
insightful and constructive comments. Their reviews greatly improved the quality and coher-
ence of this special issue. The authors are also especially grateful to David Quinto-Pozos for
his careful review of the first draft of this introduction and for his valuable suggestions. Sílvia
Gabarró-López is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University and Laurence Meurant
is a Research Associate of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS at the University of
Namur.

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Address for correspondence

Laurence Meurant
University of Namur
NaLTT–LSFB-Lab
rue de Bruxelles, 61
5000 Namur
Belgium
[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4555-4499

Co-author information

Sílvia Gabarró-López
Stockholm University and University of Namur
[email protected]
[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2918-108X