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Logical Meaning in Space: Iconic Biases on Quantification in Sign Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Jeremy Kuhn
Jeremy Kuhn*
Affiliation:
Institut Jean Nicod, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL Research University
*
Institut Jean Nicod Pavillon Jardin, Ecole Normale Supérieure 29, rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France, [jeremy.d.kuhn@gmail.com]
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Abstract

Typologically, the world's languages vary in how they express universal quantification and negative quantification. In patterns of concord, a single distributive or negative meaning is expressed redundantly on multiple morphological items. Sign languages, too, show semantic variation, but, surprisingly, this variation populates a specific corner of the full typological landscape. When we focus on manual signs, sign languages systematically have distributive concord but tend to not have negative concord in its canonical form. Here, I explain these typological facts as the reflection of an abstract, iconic bias. Recent work on distributive concord and negative concord has proposed that the phenomena can be explained in relation to the discourse referents they make available. The use of space in sign language also invites iconic inferences about the referents introduced in discourse. I show that these iconic inferences coincide with the meaning of distributive concord but contradict the meaning of negative concord. The sign language typology is thus explained based on what is easy and hard to represent in space.

Keywords

sign languagequantificationdistributive concordnegative concordiconicity

Information

Type
Research Report
Information
Language , Volume 96 , Issue 4 , December 2020, pp. e320 - e343
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This paper benefited from discussion with Carlo Geraci, Lena Pasalskaya, and Philippe Schlenker. The research received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 788077, Orisem, PI: Schlenker). Research was conducted at Institut d'Etudes Cognitives, which is supported by grants ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 and FrontCog ANR-17-EURE-0017.

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