Friday, November 13, 2026 

Dr. Joan Bybee 

How frequency of use and bleaching interact in language change

The question of the role of repetition or token frequency in the type of semantic change known as bleaching has as yet not been thoroughly examined. A recent paper by Bernd Heine and colleagues argues that language-users’ purposeful extension of forms to new contexts drives frequency increases and that repetition plays no causal role in meaning change in grammaticalization. The goal of the current presentation is to use quantitative data concerning two bleaching episodes in the development of American English: the case of recent lexical meaning change in the verb GRAB (Bybee and Moder 2024) and the case of an important inflection point in the grammaticalization of be going to in the nineteenth century (Bybee and Torres Cacoullos to appear). In both cases, the data show that frequency increases precede the robust appearance of the bleached meanings as well as some syntactic extensions.

Saturday, November 14, 2026

Dr. Lina Hou

Signed languages as interactionally multimodal?

Multimodality is an ongoing topic in signed language linguistics, commonly discussed from the angle of structure. This talk discusses the exploratory concept of interactional multimodality in two distinct areas of my research program: linguistic ethnographic studies of ‘making hands’, an emerging family signed language in a Mesoamerican community in Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, and American Sign Language (ASL).I propose that both making hands and ASL are not only structurally multimodal but also interactionally multimodal. In making hands, signers use a wide range of multimodal resources within their bodies, which include manual and non-manual forms that vary in degree of conventionalization, and from their environments, to situate the meaning of some forms in context through face-to-face interaction. In ASL, signers also use multimodal resources within their bodies and from their digital environments, particularly social media, to communicate with
public audiences. Thinking about how signed languages are multimodal – not because of the language modalities
available to the signers, but because of the larger ecological systems that deaf people inhabit in different parts of the world– has consequences for how signed languages are shaped the way they are and major theoretical implications for linguistics theories.