This project investigates how showing meaning is connected to telling meaning. This is done by analyzing the relationship between bodily enactment – constructed action – and traditional lexical language use – regular telling – in Finnish Sign Language. Until now, the concrete ways in which constructed action is connected to regular telling in social language use, the production of physical movement, and meaning processing in the brain have been largely unexplored. To produce new information on these connections and, consequently, to help researchers better understand the nature of language, this project investigates these phenomena with multidimensional corpus, motion capture and neuroimaging (EEG) data. The research will be carried out in the Sign Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. For more in English, see Jantunen, T. (2017). Constructed action, the clause and the nature of syntax in Finnish Sign Language. Open Linguistics 3, 65-85.

2021

2025