Dorothy Ahn Seminar

This seminar will provide an overview of aspects of the semantic research in sign languages, taking the recent discussions on indexical pointing used for referent tracking as a case study. We will identify and discuss the main challenges and limitations of research in this domain, as well as whether and how such research allows us to reevaluate current theories of referent tracking based on spoken languages. In particular, we will explore how theories of indexical pointing can help us tease apart a number of existing theories on demonstratives for spoken languages as well as the internal syntactic and semantic composition of indexical constituents in both signed and spoken languages.