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Mouthing in Russian Sign Language

Project description

The project on Mouthing in Russian Sign Language  was funded by the German Science Foundation (2017-2022).

This project provided the first detailed corpus-based description of mouthings in Russian Sign Language. This project examined various aspects of mouthing as these are used by native RSL signers in the RSL corpus. Our results contribute new insights into the form, speading, use, functions and/or origin of this phenomenon. Based on data from the online RSL Corpus we first identified, annotated and then explored the distribution, forms, functions and usage of mouthings in RSL. Our main findings with regard to mouthings show that sign languages exhibit more extensive variation in the use of mouthings than has previously been assumed. We – thus far uniquely – describe mouthings also as a written-language-based contact phenomenon based on our corpus analysis (Bauer & Kyuseva 2022).

Our findings have important implications for sign language teaching and provide a better understanding of the nature of such contact-induced features in sign languages in general and reveal a complex interplay of the modalities of signed, spoken and written languages.

Team

Anastasia Bauer – principal investigator
Roman Poryadin –research assistant
Kristina Kiehn – assistent (wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft)

Collaborations with Svetlana Burkova, Kyuseva, Susanne Mohr.

Latest outcome

Bauer, Anastasia 2023. Schriftsprache und Mundbild:  Ergebnisse einer neuen Korpusstudie. In DAS ZEICHEN - 37:120, 81-149.

Mohr, Susanne & Anastasia Bauer. 2022. Gesture, sign languages and multimodality. In Svenja Völkel & Nico Nassenstein (Eds.). Approaches to Language and Culture, De Gruyter Mouton, Band 1 der Reihe Anthropological Linguistics [AL], 159-196, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726626 

Bauer, Anastasia & Maria Kyuseva. 2022. New insights on mouthings in sign languages: evidence from corpus and elicitation studies of Russian sign language. Frontiers in Psychology 12, Sec. Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.779958 [open access] 

Bauer, Anastasia. 2022. Zum Ursprung der Mundbilder in der Russischen Gebärdensprache: ein komplexes Zusammenspiel von Gebärden-, Laut- und Schriftsprache. Eingeladener Vortrag an der Universität Göttingen, 25.05.2022 

Bauer, Anastasia. 2021. Re-thinking the origin of mouthings: it is a written language contact phenomenon. LingCologne21 Multilingualism, University of Cologne. 

Bauer, Anastasia. 2020. Das Konzept der multimodalen Sprache am Beispiel von der Russischen Gebärdensprache. Bulletin der deutschen Slavistik 26, Berlin: Frank & Timme Verlag, 131-139 [open access] 

Bauer, Anastasia. 2019. „When words meet signs: A corpus-based study on variation of mouthing in Russian Sign Language“. In: Anastasia Bauer & Bunčić, Daniel (Eds.). Linguistische Beiträge zur Slavistik, Specimina philologiae Slavicae 198, 9-35, [open access]. 

Bauer, Anastasia. 2019. Seeing stress: temporal reduction in Russian sign language mouthings. TISLR 13, University Hamburg, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18239.53924

Bauer, Anastasia. 2018. Артикуляция в русском жестовом языке. In: Kempgen, Sebastian / Monika Wingender / Ludger Udolph (Hrsg.):  Deutsche Beiträge zum 16. Internationalen Slavistenkongress, Belgrad 2018. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, Die Welt der Slaven 63, 36-46, [open access]. 

Bauer, Anastasia, Burkova, Svetlana & Vadim Kimmelman. 2018. Non-manual markers in Russian Sign Language: three case studies. SIGN 9 Conference, Warsaw, Polen.