Manual and nonmanual cues used for the prosodic encoding of contrastive focus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language)

This paper explores the manual and nonmanual prosodic markers used to express contrastive
focus in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language). To investigate this information
unit, videos extracted from the LSFB Corpus (Meurant 2015) and produced by six native
deaf signers in two tasks were annotated and analysed. The preliminary results, based
on both quantitative and qualitative analyses, show that contrastive focus is encoded
by discernible prosodic patterns in LSFB at the level of stress and intonation. Stress
markers include variations in duration, mouth articulations, holds, and combinations
of manual cues. Regarding intonation, the results suggest a differentiation in the usage
of body leans and head movements on contrastive focus and in the surrounding
context, and support the notion of componentiality (or layering) of nonmanual markers.
Ultimately, the study challenges the view of a one-to-one relationship between specific
markers and their meanings, suggesting that meaning emerges from the interplay
ofmultiple resources.