Irit Meir
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 781019 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Irit Meir |
| PRENOMES | Irit |
| SOBRENOME | Meir |
| ASSINATURA | MEIR I |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Haifa |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 22 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 146 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 22 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Variation of sign parameters in narrative and expository discourse
The paper presents an in-depth study of variation in sign parameters of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). We describe and analyze specific sign parameters and their sub-parameters: handshape, orientation, place of articulation, and movement, as they are distributed in two text-types: narrative and expository discourse. A group of 16 deaf native ISL signers produced 32 texts containing a total of 6,875 signs which were then analyzed from a bottom-up ap…
Linguistic Variation, Discourse Analysis, and Deaf Education
Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers’ ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of t…
Topic-open-endedness
Humans can use language to refer to and describe endless varieties of situations, thoughts, ideas, and topics, actual or hypothetical. This capacity, which distinguishes human language from communication systems of other animals, is referred to here as topic-open-endedness. A key factor in explaining topic-open-endedness early in the life of a new sign language is the nature of the linguistic symbols, the words, and the human ability to extend th…
Visual foreign accent in an emerging sign language
In the study of sign language phonology, little attention has been paid to the phonetic detail that distinguishes one sign language from another. We approach this issue by studying the foreign accent of signers of a young sign language – Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) – which is in contact with another sign language in the region, Israeli Sign Language (ISL). By comparing ISL signs and sentences produced by ABSL signers with those of ISL …
The two‐sided nature of reliance on prior knowledge and on L1/L2 structural similarity in L2 sentence comprehension
The study explored the contribution of prior knowledge and reliance on L1 syntactic knowledge to L2 written sentence comprehension. Participants, 102 native Hebrew speakers at three education levels (junior high, high school, and postsecondary), answered questions in two sentence categories: Semantically plausible sentences that readers can understand by linking their content words to prior knowledge; semantically neutral sentences, whose compreh…
The Impact of Contact Languages on the Degrammaticalization of the Hebrew Definite Article
The Hebrew article ha - is apparently undergoing a process of degrammaticalization within Modern Hebrew. Its distribution has been changing in a particular direction that is unexpected from the point of view of historical linguistics. Whereas in Classical Hebrew it was found with a limited number of lexical items, it now attaches to a variety of phrases. This change is indicative of a change in its morpho-syntactic category: it is becoming more a…
Iconicity
Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance or similarity between the two aspects of a sign: its form and its meaning. An iconic sign is one whose form resembles its meaning in some way. The opposite of iconicity is arbitrariness. In an arbitrary sign, the association between form and meaning is based solely on convention; there is nothing in the form of the sign that resembles aspects of its meaning. A road sign that marks a bicycle lane and has …
Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons
Iconicity is an acknowledged property of both gesture and sign language. In contrast to the familiar definition of iconicity as a correspondence between individual forms and their referents, we explore iconicity as a shared property among groups of signs, in what we call patterned iconicity . In this paper, we focus on iconic strategies used by hearing silent gesturers and by signers of three unrelated sign languages in an elicitation task featur…
Competing iconicities in the structure of languages
The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examin…
The evolution of verb classes and verb agreement in sign languages
The influence of community on language structure
By comparing two sign languages of approximately the same age but which arose and developed under different social circumstances, we are able to identify possible relationships between social factors and language structure. We argue that two structural properties of these languages are related to the size and the heterogeneity versus homogeneity of their respective communities: use of space in grammatical structure and degree of lexical and suble…
The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language
The emergence of complexity in prosody and syntax
Iconicity and metaphor
Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are th…
Sentence-phrase coordination in Hebrew and the syntax–pragmatics interface
The coordination of a sentence and a phrase (Sentence-Phrase coordination, henceforth SPC) is a very widespread, though marked, construction in Modern Hebrew. It is characterized by special prosody in that it carries two sentential stresses, and is perceived as more forceful or emphatic than its non-conjoined counterpart. A full account of the properties and distribution of the construction involves both a syntactic and a pragmatic component. The…
The role of prosody in morphological change
The morphological system of cardinal numerals in Modern Hebrew is currently undergoing rapid changes, enabling linguists to unravel the forces shaping the change as it takes place. In the free forms, gender marking on numerals is neutralized by collapsing both masculine and feminine forms into one paradigm, the feminine paradigm. In the bound (definite) forms, an opposite direction is attested, in that at least for some numerals, the masculine fo…
Body as subject
The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sublexical structure of iconic s…
Morphological levels and diachronic change in Modern Hebrew plural formation
Modern Hebrew (MH) is undergoing a change in its morphological structure. Unlike earlier periods of the language, in which all nominal suffixation processes resulted in stress shift to the suffix, MH has a few suffixes that exhibit variable behavior. When attached to canonical bases, they pattern with other suffixes in that they attract stress and may cause phonological changes to the base. When attached to non-canonical bases, they do not attrac…
The emergence of grammar
This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community. We describe the syntactic structure of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that has arisen in the last 70 years in an isolated endogamous community with a high incidence of nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound prelingual neurosensory deafness. In the space of one generation from…
The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology
Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of inflectional morphology, verb agreement and classifier con…
Grammaticalization and modality
This paper focuses on the role of modality in determining certain properties of grammaticalization processes in signed vs. spoken languages. The process examined here is the evolution of a case-marked pronoun in the pronominal system of Israeli Sign Language. This pronoun is shown to have evolved from the homophonous noun PERSON. The grammaticalization path leading to the evolution of a case distinction is compared to the evolution of case marker…
A Cross-Modality Perspective On Verb Agreement
The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology
Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of inflectional morphology, verb agreement and classifier con…
Body as subject
The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sublexical structure of iconic s…
The emergence of complexity in prosody and syntax
Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons
Iconicity is an acknowledged property of both gesture and sign language. In contrast to the familiar definition of iconicity as a correspondence between individual forms and their referents, we explore iconicity as a shared property among groups of signs, in what we call patterned iconicity . In this paper, we focus on iconic strategies used by hearing silent gesturers and by signers of three unrelated sign languages in an elicitation task featur…
The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language
A Cross-Modality Perspective On Verb Agreement
The influence of community on language structure
By comparing two sign languages of approximately the same age but which arose and developed under different social circumstances, we are able to identify possible relationships between social factors and language structure. We argue that two structural properties of these languages are related to the size and the heterogeneity versus homogeneity of their respective communities: use of space in grammatical structure and degree of lexical and suble…
Competing iconicities in the structure of languages
The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examin…
Grammaticalization and modality
This paper focuses on the role of modality in determining certain properties of grammaticalization processes in signed vs. spoken languages. The process examined here is the evolution of a case-marked pronoun in the pronominal system of Israeli Sign Language. This pronoun is shown to have evolved from the homophonous noun PERSON. The grammaticalization path leading to the evolution of a case distinction is compared to the evolution of case marker…
Iconicity and metaphor
Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are th…
A Cross-Modality Perspective On Verb Agreement
Grammaticalization and modality
This paper focuses on the role of modality in determining certain properties of grammaticalization processes in signed vs. spoken languages. The process examined here is the evolution of a case-marked pronoun in the pronominal system of Israeli Sign Language. This pronoun is shown to have evolved from the homophonous noun PERSON. The grammaticalization path leading to the evolution of a case distinction is compared to the evolution of case marker…
The emergence of grammar
This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community. We describe the syntactic structure of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that has arisen in the last 70 years in an isolated endogamous community with a high incidence of nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound prelingual neurosensory deafness. In the space of one generation from…
The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology
Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and simultaneous. The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational. We show that at least two pervasive types of inflectional morphology, verb agreement and classifier con…
Morphological levels and diachronic change in Modern Hebrew plural formation
Modern Hebrew (MH) is undergoing a change in its morphological structure. Unlike earlier periods of the language, in which all nominal suffixation processes resulted in stress shift to the suffix, MH has a few suffixes that exhibit variable behavior. When attached to canonical bases, they pattern with other suffixes in that they attract stress and may cause phonological changes to the base. When attached to non-canonical bases, they do not attrac…
Body as subject
The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sublexical structure of iconic s…
Sentence-phrase coordination in Hebrew and the syntax–pragmatics interface
The coordination of a sentence and a phrase (Sentence-Phrase coordination, henceforth SPC) is a very widespread, though marked, construction in Modern Hebrew. It is characterized by special prosody in that it carries two sentential stresses, and is perceived as more forceful or emphatic than its non-conjoined counterpart. A full account of the properties and distribution of the construction involves both a syntactic and a pragmatic component. The…
The role of prosody in morphological change
The morphological system of cardinal numerals in Modern Hebrew is currently undergoing rapid changes, enabling linguists to unravel the forces shaping the change as it takes place. In the free forms, gender marking on numerals is neutralized by collapsing both masculine and feminine forms into one paradigm, the feminine paradigm. In the bound (definite) forms, an opposite direction is attested, in that at least for some numerals, the masculine fo…
Iconicity and metaphor
Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are th…
The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language
The emergence of complexity in prosody and syntax
The evolution of verb classes and verb agreement in sign languages
The influence of community on language structure
By comparing two sign languages of approximately the same age but which arose and developed under different social circumstances, we are able to identify possible relationships between social factors and language structure. We argue that two structural properties of these languages are related to the size and the heterogeneity versus homogeneity of their respective communities: use of space in grammatical structure and degree of lexical and suble…
Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons
Iconicity is an acknowledged property of both gesture and sign language. In contrast to the familiar definition of iconicity as a correspondence between individual forms and their referents, we explore iconicity as a shared property among groups of signs, in what we call patterned iconicity . In this paper, we focus on iconic strategies used by hearing silent gesturers and by signers of three unrelated sign languages in an elicitation task featur…
Competing iconicities in the structure of languages
The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examin…
Iconicity
Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance or similarity between the two aspects of a sign: its form and its meaning. An iconic sign is one whose form resembles its meaning in some way. The opposite of iconicity is arbitrariness. In an arbitrary sign, the association between form and meaning is based solely on convention; there is nothing in the form of the sign that resembles aspects of its meaning. A road sign that marks a bicycle lane and has …
The Impact of Contact Languages on the Degrammaticalization of the Hebrew Definite Article
The Hebrew article ha - is apparently undergoing a process of degrammaticalization within Modern Hebrew. Its distribution has been changing in a particular direction that is unexpected from the point of view of historical linguistics. Whereas in Classical Hebrew it was found with a limited number of lexical items, it now attaches to a variety of phrases. This change is indicative of a change in its morpho-syntactic category: it is becoming more a…
Topic-open-endedness
Humans can use language to refer to and describe endless varieties of situations, thoughts, ideas, and topics, actual or hypothetical. This capacity, which distinguishes human language from communication systems of other animals, is referred to here as topic-open-endedness. A key factor in explaining topic-open-endedness early in the life of a new sign language is the nature of the linguistic symbols, the words, and the human ability to extend th…
Visual foreign accent in an emerging sign language
In the study of sign language phonology, little attention has been paid to the phonetic detail that distinguishes one sign language from another. We approach this issue by studying the foreign accent of signers of a young sign language – Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) – which is in contact with another sign language in the region, Israeli Sign Language (ISL). By comparing ISL signs and sentences produced by ABSL signers with those of ISL …
The two‐sided nature of reliance on prior knowledge and on L1/L2 structural similarity in L2 sentence comprehension
The study explored the contribution of prior knowledge and reliance on L1 syntactic knowledge to L2 written sentence comprehension. Participants, 102 native Hebrew speakers at three education levels (junior high, high school, and postsecondary), answered questions in two sentence categories: Semantically plausible sentences that readers can understand by linking their content words to prior knowledge; semantically neutral sentences, whose compreh…
Linguistic Variation, Discourse Analysis, and Deaf Education
Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers’ ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of t…
Variation of sign parameters in narrative and expository discourse
The paper presents an in-depth study of variation in sign parameters of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). We describe and analyze specific sign parameters and their sub-parameters: handshape, orientation, place of articulation, and movement, as they are distributed in two text-types: narrative and expository discourse. A group of 16 deaf native ISL signers produced 32 texts containing a total of 6,875 signs which were then analyzed from a bottom-up ap…
Linguistics (22 obras) · Computer Science (18 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · Mathematics (15 obras) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (14 obras) · Sign language (12 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (9 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (6 obras)