PhD Supervision

In her PhD project, Nia is investigating how sign languages employ iconicity to create novel signs with new meanings (colexification). She is carrying out a cross-linguistic comparison of concepts British Sign Language (BSL) and German Sign Language (DGS) to understand processes of colexification and semantic extension. Her PhD is co-supervised by Pamela Perniss and funded by the AHRC-DFG research grant for the project From icon to abstraction: how iconicity shapes the lexicon in the manual-visual modality.

Chenxi is carrying out a cross-linguistic developmental study where she is comparing how Chinese and British children learn how to talk about causal events from a multimodal perspective. Using an elicitation task she is comparing how children ages 4-7 years-old use speech and gesture to talk about causes and results. She is based at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and her primary supervisors are Alan Cienki and Martine Coene.

Rebeca is exploring the linguistic structure of conditional sentences in Mexican Sign Language (LSM). She is challenging the traditional assumption that all languages follow the form 'If P then Q'. She finds that LSM follows similar strategies similar as other non-inflectional languages like Chinese (i.e., parataxis and lexical cues) as well as modality-specific strategies (i.e., use of space). 

Annika's PhD project investigates how iconicity is exploited in a signed lexicon to refer to concrete an abstract concepts. She is comparing the iconic strategies used in two unrelated sign languages (British Sign Language and German Sign Language) as well as the silent gestures produced by British and German speakers. Her PhD is co-supervised by Pamela Perniss and funded by the AHRC-DFG research grant for the project From icon to abstraction: how iconicity shapes the lexicon in the manual-visual modality.