“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” A functional description of time expressions through fingers based on Chinese Sign Language naturalistic data

This paper investigates the relationship between fingers and time representations in naturalistic Chinese Sign Language (CSL). Based on a CSL Corpus (Shanghai Variant, 2016–), we offer a thorough description of finger configurations for time expressions from 63 deaf signers, including three main types: digital, numeral incorporation, and points-to-fingers. The former two were further divided into vertical and horizontal fingers according to the orientation of fingertips. The results showed that there were interconnections between finger representations, numbers, ordering, and time in CSL. Vertical fingers were mainly used to quantify time units, whereas horizontal fingers were mostly used for sequencing or ordering events, and their forms could be influenced by Chinese number characters and the vertical writing direction. Furthermore, the use of points-to-fingers (e.g., pointing to the thumb, index, or little finger) formed temporal connectives in CSL and could be patterned to put a conversation in order. Additionally, CSL adopted similar linguistic forms in sequential time and adverbs of reason (e.g., cause and effect: events that happened earlier and events that happen later). Such a cause-and-effect relationship was a special type of temporal sequence. In conclusion, fingers are essential for time representation in CSL and their forms are biologically and culturally shaped.

Temporal connectives and verbal tenses as processing instructions

In this paper, we aim to enhance our understanding about the processing of implicit and explicit temporal chronological relations by investigating the roles of temporal connectives and verbal tenses, separately and in interaction. In particular, we investigate how two temporal connectives (ensuiteandpuis, both meaning ‘then’) and two verbal tenses expressing past time (the simple and compound past) act as processing instructions for chronological relations in French. Theoretical studies have suggested that the simple past encodes the instruction to relate events sequentially, unlike the more flexible compound past, which does not. Using an online experiment with a self-paced reading task, we show that these temporal connectives facilitate the processing of chronological relations when they are expressed with both verbal tenses, and that no significant difference is found between the two verbal tenses, nor between the two connectives. By means of an offline experiment with an evaluation task, we find, contrary to previous studies, that comprehenders prefer chronological relations to be overtly marked rather than implicitly expressed, and prefer to use the connectivepuisin particular. Furthermore, comprehenders prefer it when these relations are expressed using the compound past, rather than the simple past. Instead of using thecontinuityhypothesis (Segal et al. 1991,Murray 1997) to explain the processing of temporal relations, we conclude that a more accurate explanation considers a cluster of factors including linguistic knowledge (connectives, tenses, grammatical and lexical aspect) and world knowledge.

Supporting Children in Mastering Temporal Relations of Stories

Though temporal reasoning is a key factor for text comprehension, existing proposals for visualizing temporal information and temporal connectives proves to be inadequate for children, not only for their levels of abstraction and detail, but also because they rely on pre-existing mental models of time and temporal connectives, while in the case of children the system has to induce the development of a mental model not existing yet. Filling this gap was the main goal of the FP7 European project TERENCE, which developed an adaptive learning system shaped around the concepts of repeated interaction experience and of graded text simplification and consistent with consolidated pedagogical approaches built on question-based games. In particular, in this paper the authors present the main features of its learner-oriented read-and-play visual interaction environment that, according to the dual-coding theory, follows a two-tiers approach pairing verbal and visual information.

Translation Assessment of Temporal Succession of Events in Narrative Discourse from Arabic into English

<em>The present paper aims at investigating the lexical and grammatical means by which events in written texts are temporally sequenced in standard Arabic and Standard English. Temporal succession refers to the chronological order of events which is signalled typically by conjunctions, tense, aspect, synonyms, antonyms, time adverbials and prepositions. The researcher built his study on two hypotheses: firstly, both languages tend to use the same lexico-grammatical devices to achieve the succession concerned. Secondly, translating Arabic temporal connectives, found in narrative texts, into English seems to pose rendition difficulties which can be attributed to grammatical and discoursal differences between the two languages. The results of the contrastive analysis conducted by the researcher have proved that the two languages partially employ the same lexico-grammatical connectives to maintain the temporal sequence of actions and events. However, unlike English, Arabic employs some coordinators as time connectives. As for the translation assessment, it has been found out that in Arabic literary texts, time connectives have not been accurately translated. This has been particularly in evidence as far as Arabic coordinators (as time connectives) are concerned.</em>

Perception and the Choice of Language in Oral Narrative: The Case of the Co-Temporal Connectives

Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1981), pp. 284-294