Brown, Matthew Simon; (2025) Conjunction, disjunction, and scalar implicatures in British Sign Language. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This project explores conjunction and disjunction in British Sign Language (BSL), and the effects of linguistic context and language acquisition on the relative strength of exclusivity inferences from disjunction in BSL (a type of scalar implicature). Part 1 investigates BSL conjunction and disjunction via an analysis of spontaneous conversation data from the BSL Corpus, examining manual, non-manual, and asyndetic articulation. Descriptive findings provide relative frequencies of various ways of expressing these coordinations. A hierarchical clustering analysis indicates that contrary to assertions made for some other sign languages, there is no robust association between specific forms of co-occurring non-manual feature and coordination types in the sample, with the qualified exception of English mouthings. It is argued that such forms of non-manual marking are prosodic. Part 2 documents a scalar implicature judgement task experiment with a continuous rating scale paradigm. Deaf adult BSL users were exposed to short descriptions of picture stimuli given by a video “guessing game partner”. Test conditions elicited exclusivity inferences from disjunctive statements; control conditions were designed to verify semantic understanding and reinforce the accessibility of the stronger scalar alternatives. The lexical structure of the coordinations and contrastive non-manual prosody over the coordinates were manipulated per trial item; the participants were grouped by age of BSL acquisition and English reading accuracy score. Bayesian mixed effects modelling indicates that for participants with the most language experience, where the lexical context is minimal, contrastive non-manual prosody has a tendency to increase the strength of exclusivity inferences, as has been demonstrated in analogous spoken language experiments. For those with less language experience, lexical context is more influential, but readings are generally more inclusive. These findings are argued to be compatible with a “probabilistic pragmatics” account of implicatures, and to further support the characterisation of non-manual marking of BSL coordination as prosodic.

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