Guest lecture with Ni Lan

21 May 2025, by Pamela Sundhausen

Photo: UHH/IDGS; CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, 2009

Part I: The Historical Evolution of Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and the Current State of CSL Research

Part II: Negation Typology in CSL: A Cross-Modal Analysis of Sequential and Simultaneous Marking

Who? Prof. Dr. Ni Lan

When? 21. May 2025
, 10:15-11:45 Uhr

Where? IDGS – GFW 7
, Room: A0020

Languages: English / DGS / International Sign

Part I: The Historical Evolution of Chinese Sign Language and the Current State of CSL Research
The part conducts a systematic investigation into the historical formation of Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and advancements in its linguistic research. Through a diachronic lens, it traces the symbiotic relationship between CSL and the history of deaf education in China, beginning with the establishment of the first deaf school—the Dengzhou School for the Deaf (China’s first deaf education institution)—in Yantai in 1887. This milestone marked the institutional coalescence of the deaf community and initiated CSL’s century-long evolution (1887–present) as an independent language. Constrained by the oralism paradigm, CSL only gained formal linguistic recognition in the early 21st century. Despite its relatively recent emergence, current research has systematically mapped CSL’s phonology, lexicon, and syntax, while expanding into applied linguistics domains such as professional sign language interpreting, language policy and multilingual pedagogical practices in deaf education.

Part II: Negation Typology in Chinese Sign Language: A Cross-Modal Analysis of Sequential and Simultaneous Marking
This study delineates the typological architecture of negation systems in sign languages through a visual-gestural modality lens, with Chinese Sign Language (CSL) as the empirical focus. Drawing on typological frameworks (Dryer 2013; Zeshan 2004), we demonstrate that negation in human languages universally operates via morphological or syntactic strategies—including negative particles, auxiliaries, and affixes—yet sign languages exhibit modality-specific innovations through the grammaticalization of spatial-topological features. While manual signs in CSL align with spoken languages in employing sequential negation markers, its dominant negatory mechanism exploits simultaneous layering of non-manual markers that operate across syntactic domains.