Symposium on Creoles and Pidgins in Signed and Spoken Languages

Communication between people who do not share a common language may lead to the emergence of a contact language (pidgin) and, with intergenerational transmission, of a Creole. Deaf people who do not know a common sign language are able to communicate about a vast range of topics from the first encounter onward. This symposium brings together experts who study such “first-encounter” scenarios in signed and spoken languages, including evidence of tactile sign language during International Signed communication by deaf-blind people.

Conference languages: International Sign, English

13:15 - 13:30   Welcome (Coffee/Tea)

13:30 - 14:15   Christian Rathmann (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Revisiting Issues of Standardization and Variation in IS/IntSL

14:15 - 15:00   Susanne Maria Michaelis (Leipzig University & MPI-EVA, Leipzig)

The systematic contributions of substrates and lexifiers in creolization processes (of spoken languages)

15:00 - 15:15   Coffee/Tea

15:15 - 16:00   Johanna Mesch (Stockholm University)

Cross-signing in tactile sign language context

16:00 - 16:30   Nick Palfreyman (University of Central Lancashire, Preston)

Discussion

Please note that this event has been made possible by contributions from NWO (VICI no. 277-70-014 Crasborn), ERC (St. G. ELISA-852352 De Vos), Radboud University, and the Multimodal Language Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.