The Department of Anthropology Colloquium Presents:

"From 'gesturecraft' to grammar: action, gesture, and sign in Zincantec
family homesign"

Speaker: John Haviland, Linguistic Anthropologist & Chair of Anthropology at UCSD

Dr. Haviland is a linguistic anthropologist, distinguished professor,
and currently Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University
of California at San Diego. His current work concentrates on Tzotzil
(Mayan) speaking peasant cornfarmers from Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico,
where he is conducting a study of language origins based on extensive
documentation of a first generation sign language (Zinacantec Family
Homesign, or ZFHS). Below is an abstract of his talk (also attached):

This paper describes a first generation "family" sign language from a
Tzotzil-speaking village in highland Chiapas, Mexico. The family
includes three deaf siblings who have never met other deaf people, never
been exposed to another sign language, hardly been to school, and had
virtually no contact with speakers of any spoken language other than
Tzotzil. The deaf individuals, who range from their early twenties to
their early thirties, along with a fourth intermediate hearing sibling
and a slightly younger hearing niece, have grown up using and
contributing to a shared manual communicative system. Additionally, a
now four-year-old child is simultaneously acquiring his mother and
uncles' homesign and spoken Tzotzil.Intensive fieldwork on this tiny
emerging language community began in 2008.


This presentation concentrates on a central question about linguistic
signs: where do they come from? Previous research on manual gesture in
Zinacantec Tzotzil allows direct attention to probable semiotic sources
(especially in what Jürgen Streeck calls "gesturecraft") for this
homesign. Using both natural observation and semi-experimental results,
the talk posits an apparent progression from visible action, sometimes
through "iconic" co-speech gesture, to grammaticalized "portable" signs
which can be emancipated from the immediate context of speaking, or
which contribute to emergent linguistic structure. Recent data from the
4-year-old second generation signer demonstrate related processes of
meta-iconic regimentation and formal simplification. Finally, the
language of these Zinacantecs as compared to Tzotzil, the surrounding
spoken Mayan language, suggests reevaluation of familiar assumptions
about "language and culture" at the level of lexical and conceptual
linkages.