German Sign Language and
Communication of the Deaf
Photo: UHH/Denstorf
14 June 2021, by Pamela Sundhausen
Photo: IDGS
On June 2, Prof Dr Tommi Jantunen from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland was our guest at the IDGS and enriched us with a very exciting lecture. The subject of his talk was role-taking, known in international research as constructed action, using Finnish Sign Language as an example. In his presentation, entitled "Showing and Telling in Finnish Sign Language. Evidence for a Hybrid System", Professor Jantunen reported on his recent and current projects, in which he and his team have investigated forms and types of role-taking through various methods, including corpus data, motion capture and psycholinguistic experiments on language processing. His results support the idea that language - in this case a sign language - has two modes of expression: showing (signaling meaning through depiction) and telling (signaling meaning through description).