Nathan Sanders | University of Toronto (original) (raw)

Papers by Nathan Sanders

Language 90(2), Jun 1, 2014

West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 21 Proceedings, 2002

Segmental loss between related forms (inputs and outputs, outputs and derived outputs, etc.) can ... more Segmental loss between related forms (inputs and outputs, outputs and derived outputs, etc.) can be motivated either by surface markedness conditions or purely by morphology. It is this latter type of morphological truncation, or simply truncation, that I am concerned with in this paper. Many languages have truncation processes: (1) a. English hypocoristics rItS«rd rItS ÔRichard~RichÕ suz«n su ÔSusan~SueÕ

Sign languages seem not to be amenable to traditional historical reconstruction via the comparati... more Sign languages seem not to be amenable to traditional historical reconstruction via the comparative method, making it difficult to replicate the successes achieved in the diachronic study of spoken languages. We propose to alleviate this difficulty with an alternative approach that draws upon both iconicity and biomechanics, especially the drive for reducing articulatory effort. We offer a preliminary, and necessarily speculative, demonstration of this approach with an analysis of the movement parameter in the signs for ATTENTION in French Sign Language and languages related to it. We show how consideration of iconicity and biomechanically natural changes can be enough to reconstruct a plausible movement parameter for the source sign and to explain the historical development of its modern descendants, even those that are superficially dissimilar. This method confirms known relationships and adds new evidence in support of suspected relationships, helping to fill in a methodological ...

This chapter outlines the history of language construction, beginning with the earliest recorded ... more This chapter outlines the history of language construction, beginning with the earliest recorded examples of linguistic creativity and continuing with the first true constructed languages from the Middle Ages up through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when language construction was guided largely by religious and philosophical concerns. The chapter continues by exploring more recent history, when language construction was guided more by practical goals to unite humanity. At the same time, language construction as an art form was also being developed, most notably by J. R. R. Tolkien, who set the stage for the modern era of artistic language construction requiring specialized knowledge, talent, and hard work. The chapter also discusses the emerging role of language construction as a tool for language revitalization and concludes with a summary of terms and concepts that are important to the study of constructed languages.

Because of inherent limitations of the human visual system, some movements are more difficult to ... more Because of inherent limitations of the human visual system, some movements are more difficult to perceive than others are. This may result in those movements being dispreferred in sign languages. I explore this possibility for two notable visual limitations: the difficulty in perceiving motion-in-depth and the horizontal-vertical illusion. Across signs with two-handed path movement in the lexicons of 24 sign languages, I find evidence that motion-in-depth is indeed statistically underrepresented, while the horizontal-vertical illusion seems to play no role in the lexical distribution of path movements. As a contribution to the growing field of sign language phonetics, this work expands our understanding of how the physical properties of the human body do (and do not) shape the structure of language.

The goal of this project is to define a basic statistical measure of vowel harmony over an arbitr... more The goal of this project is to define a basic statistical measure of vowel harmony over an arbitrary corpus, such that this measure can be used to meaningfully compare the relative harmony between any languages, corpora, or phonological features. For example, we might want to know whether Finnish is more harmonic for backness than Hungarian is, or whether Tuvan is more harmonic for backness than for roundness, or whether Turkish is more harmonic for backness in literary writing than in academic writing. With such a measure of vowel harmony applied to the appropriate temporally spaced corpora, we could even determine the quantitative trajectory of a language’s harmony over time: when and how fast it increased or decreased.

Linguistics Research Center, Oct 1, 1999

Papers from the 37th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 2001

Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 2020

In this paper, we describe work we conducted over the first year of a three-year initiative to u... more In this paper, we describe work we conducted over the first year of a three-year initiative to update how linguistics is taught in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto to address some types of language-based biases that can arise in the linguistics classroom. We present this work in an effort to provide a model for instructors at other institutions and even in other fields, in the hope that they can draw inspiration from our methods in order to combat language-based biases in their own teaching. We begin in Section 1 with a discussion of some common language-based biases. In Section 2, we discuss the history, structure, and goals of our three-year initiative to address these biases. In Section 3, we go into depth into the five main components of our initiative. Finally, in Section 4, we explore some of the key lessons learned from the first year of this initiative.

1 Overview Since the seminal work of Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972), a key testing ground... more 1 Overview Since the seminal work of Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972), a key testing ground for functional, evolutionary, or emergentist approaches to sound systems has been the typology of vowel inventories (for example, Lindblom 1986, Schwartz et al. 1997a, de Boer 2000). ...

Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2018

Language, 2014

Spoken language has a well-known drive for ease of articulation, which Kirchner (1998, 2004) anal... more Spoken language has a well-known drive for ease of articulation, which Kirchner (1998, 2004) analyzes as reduction of the total magnitude of all biomechanical forces involved. We extend Kirchner’s insights from vocal articulation to manual articulation, with a focus on joint usage, and we discuss ways that articulatory ease might be realized in sign languages. In particular, moving more joints and/or joints more proximal to the torso results in greater mass being moved, and thus more articulatory force being expended, than moving fewer joints or moving more distal joints. We predict that in casual conversation, where articulatory ease is prized, moving fewer joints should be favored over moving more, and moving distal joints should be favored over moving proximal joints. We report on the results of our study of the casual signing of fluent signers of American Sign Language, which confirm our predictions: in comparison to citation forms of signs, the casual variants produced by the signers in our experiment exhibit an overall decrease in average joint usage, as well as a general preference for more distal articulation than is used in citation form. We conclude that all language, regardless of modality, is shaped by a fundamental drive for ease of articulation. Our work advances a cross-modality approach for considering ease of articulation, develops a potentially important vocabulary for describing variations in signs, and demonstrates that American Sign Language exhibits variation that can be accounted for in terms of ease of articulation. We further suggest that the linguistic drive for ease of articulation is part of a broader tendency for the human body to reduce biomechanical effort in all physical activities.

Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items... more Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call reactive effort: the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed to resist incidental twisting and rocking of the torso induced by path movement of the manual articulators in sign languages. We argue that, as part of a general linguistic drive to reduce articulatory effort, reactive effort should have a significant effect on the relative frequency in the lexicon of certain types of path movements. We support this argument with evidence from Italian Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, evidence that cannot be explained solely by appeal to constraints on bimanual coordination. As the first exploration of the linguistic role of reactive effort, this work contributes not only to the developing field of sign language phonetics, but to our understanding of phonetics in general, adding to a growing body of functionalist literature which shows that some linguistic patterns emerge from more fundamental factors of the physical world.

When the arms move in certain ways, they can cause the torso to twist or rock. Such extraneous to... more When the arms move in certain ways, they can cause the torso to twist or rock. Such extraneous torso movement is undesirable, especially during sign language communication, when torso position may carry linguistic significance, so we expend effort to resist it when it is not intended. This so-called "reactive effort" has only recently been identified by Sanders and Napoli (2016), but their preliminary work on three genetically unrelated languages suggests that the effects of reactive effort can be observed cross-linguistically by examination of sign language lexicons. In particular, the frequency of different kinds of manual movements in the lexicon correlates with the amount of reactive effort needed to resist movement of the torso. Following this line of research, we present evidence from 24 sign languages confirming that there is a cross-linguistic preference for minimizing the reactive effort needed to keep the torso stable.

Constructed languages (purposefully invented languages like Esperanto and Klingon) have long capt... more Constructed languages (purposefully invented languages like Esperanto and Klingon) have long captured the human imagination. They can also be used as pedagogical tools in the linguistics classroom to enhance how certain aspects of linguistics are taught and to broaden the appeal of linguistics as a field. In this article, I discuss the history and nature of constructed languages and describe various ways I have successfully brought them into use in the classroom. I conclude from the results of my courses that linguists should take a closer look at how they might benefit from similarly enlisting this often criticized hobby into more mainstream use in the linguistics classroom.

Language 90(2), Jun 1, 2014

West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 21 Proceedings, 2002

Linguistics Research Center, Oct 1, 1999

Papers from the 37th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 2001

Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 2020

Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 2018

Language, 2014

In this talk, I report on work done in collaboration with Donna Jo Napoli of Swarthmore College a... more In this talk, I report on work done in collaboration with Donna Jo Napoli of Swarthmore College and my own continuation of that work, looking at how considerations of articulatory effort and perceptual distinctiveness affect large-scale lexical patterns in sign languages. Specifically, certain types of arm movements require more articulatory effort and/or are less perceptually salient than others, which makes predictions about the relative frequency of these movements in the lexicon. The lexicons of 24 sign languages show evidence that some of these predictions hold quite strongly cross-linguistically, suggesting that there may be more fundamental biolinguistic universals at play.

Although the human body's biomechanics and visual system are fairly well understood in general, o... more Although the human body's biomechanics and visual system are fairly well understood in general, our knowledge of their relationship speciic to sign language is rather weak, especially in comparison to the extensive knowledge we have of the analogous articulatory and auditory phonetics of speech. Some work has been done on the articulatory phonetics of sign, but the perceptual phonetics are still greatly understudied. In this research, I consider two properties of visual perception that may be relevant to sign: (i) the diiculty in perceiving motion-in-depth, which causes horizontal and vertical motion to be easier to perceive than motion towards or away from the viewer; and (ii) the horizontal-vertical illusion, in which vertical motion is perceived as longer (and thus, more salient) than horizontal motion. These two factors predict that motion-in-depth should be the most perceptually marked in sign language and that vertical motion should be the least. I test these predictions by looking at the frequency of the three types of motion in signs with two-handed path movement in the lexicons of 24 sign languages. I find some evidence for a crosslinguistic bias against motion-in-depth but no evidence of a crosslinguistic preference for vertical motion, suggesting that path movement in sign may indeed be sensitive to the difficulty of perceiving motion-in-depth but perhaps not to the horizontal-vertical illusion. I conclude with some ideas on how the horizontal-vertical illusion may yet still play a role in the structure of sign languages.

(Superseded by Sanders 2014 "Gradient (dis)harmony: Hidden harmony and anti-harmony", linked here)

The nslxIPA keyboard is designed for relatively easy and intuitive Unicode input of characters fr... more The nslxIPA keyboard is designed for relatively easy and intuitive Unicode input of characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet directly from the keyboard, without having to use opaque codes or other windows to access the characters. Note that the nslxIPA keyboard is a Mac-specific keyboard layout; there may be ways of converting it for use on other systems, but it may not work as intended, if it even works at all.

The OTtablx package is designed for creating and customizing Optimality Theoretic tableaux in LaTeX.