Exploring the bimodal capacity of human language. A sociolinguistic study of language contact in the Hungarian Deaf Community

• Applicant: Dr. Szilard Racz-Engelhardt
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 327002625

The project focuses on the documentation of the bimodal bilingual language use in the Deaf Community in Hungary. Bilingual Deaf people use both spoken Hungarian and Hungarian Sign Language (Magyar Jelnyelv, MJNY). The two languages belong to different modalities (auditory-vocal and visual-gestural). As a result, language users can incorporate spoken elements in their signed utterances. According to the analysis of my doctoral thesis, this contact situation leads to linguistic phenomena not yet documented among spoken languages. The goal of the project is to gain a general understanding of this unique bimodal expression of language. The research will show that linguistic communication goes way beyond one language and one modality than it is traditionally dealt with in linguistics. The project extends the findings of the doctoral dissertation on the inflectional patterns of mouthings in MJNY and examines the morphological patterns of bilingual utterances of signers.In the first part of the analysis a corpus is investigated to find strategies of signers for matching Hungarian inflectional markers in mouthings with the grammatical meaning in the manual sign structure.The second part of the empirical study involves a judgement test filled out by native signers of MJNY. Their task is to place sign utterances with Hungarian mouthings on a language contact continuum, based on various criteria, as to being more or less close to Hungarian Sign Language. This will supplement the linguistic evidence on certain characteristic patterns of the dynamic bilingual language use.Based on the empirical analysis of bilingual utterances, further theoretical implications of this specific language use are discussed. It is assumed that MJNY signers not just produce utterances in Hungarian and MJNY, but can use a third system, a unique and individually colored set of patterns from both languages. The challenge is to draw a working model of the dynamic language use in sign bilingual utterances.The findings of this project will contribute to the documentation of the under-researched minority language MJNY. The empirically based model will offer a unique insight into the unexplored capacity of bilingual bimodal language production and extends our understanding of what is possible in the human language faculty.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Hungary
• Host: Professorin Judit Navracsics, Ph.D.