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Article published In: The Semiotic Diversity of Language: The Case of Signed Languages
Edited by Alysson Lepeut and Inez Beukeleers
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 36] 2022
► pp. 212–246

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Who’s got the upper hand?

A cross-linguistic study on overlap in VGT and LSFB

 | KU Leuven
 | University of Namur, NaLTT, LSFB-Lab
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with KU Leuven.

Published online: 9 June 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00076.beu
Abstract
A large body of research has highlighted the tight, carefully organised temporal coordination of interaction. When taking turns, people tend to minimise the occurrence of gaps and overlaps (Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation”. Language 50(4): 696–735. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Within the field of signed language linguistics, however, there is an ongoing debate: while some researchers claim that signers orient to a ‘one-speaker-at-a-time’ principle (McCleary, Leland E., and Tarcisio D. A. Leite. 2013. “Turn-Taking in Brazilian Sign Language: Evidence from Overlap”. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders 4(1): 123–154. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) as found in spoken conversation, others argue that signed language interactions allow for more overlapping turns, displaying a more collaborative floor in their turn-taking mechanics (Coates, Jennifer, and Rachel Sutton-Spence. 2001. “Turn-Taking Pans in Deaf Conversation.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(4): 507–529. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The current paper aims at contributing to this discussion by providing a first cross-linguistic, systematic account of the manifestation of overlap in two signed languages, namely LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language) and VGT (Flemish Sign Language). We analysed simultaneous signing in 2 hours of dyadic face-to-face conversations. This paper combines a quantitative account of the turn timing and thus frequency counts of overlap in VGT and LSFB interactions with a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the interactional, i.e., sequential environment, in which overlap occurs and the strategies deployed to accomplish overlap resolution by deaf participants. In doing so, this paper sheds further light on the orderliness of signed conversation, and ultimately contributes to a better understanding of the semiotic complexity of multimodal interaction management across language ecologies (Ferrara, Lindsay, and Gabrielle Hodge. 2018. “Language as Description, Indication, and Depiction.” Frontiers in Psychology 91: 716. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overlap in signed interaction
    • 2.1Signed interactions allow for more overlap
    • 2.2Towards a tight temporal coordination of signed discourse
  • 3.Aims of the current study
  • 4.Preliminary notes on LSFB and VGT
  • 5.Material and methods
    • 5.1Corpora
      • 5.1.1The LSFB Corpus (Meurant 2015)
      • 5.1.2The VGT Corpus (Van Herreweghe et al. 2015)
    • 5.2Procedure and analysis
      • 5.2.1Segmenting turns
      • 5.2.2Identifying moments of simultaneous signing: Annotation of overlap
      • 5.2.3Identifying overlap types in relation to their position in the turn-taking system
      • 5.2.4Identifying overlap functions following Schegloff’s (2000) typology
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Overview of the data
    • 6.2Identifying different types of overlap according to turn position
    • 6.3Type of overlap: Classifying overlap according to Schegloff’s model
      • 6.3.1Relative distribution of the different types of overlap
    • 6.4Types of overlap – Qualitative functional analysis
      • 6.4.1Collaborative overlap in LSFB and VGT
      • 6.4.2Competitive overlap in LSFB and VGT
      • 6.4.3Interim summary
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Limitations and suggestions for future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
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