Vanessa Wing Yan Tsang

I have joined the Sign Lab in Göttingen as a doctoral student of the Research Training Group 2636 “Form-meaning mismatches” since 2024. My research project, supervised by Markus Steinbach and Nina-Kristin Meister, focuses on spatial constructions in the visual modality. Specifically, I am interested in the description of motion events and speed, and the linguistic and gestural constraints of classifier constructions. As a first step, I compare two historically unrelated sign languages, German Sign Language (DGS) and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL), with the aim of investigating the shared and language-specific properties of motion representation in signs, as well as examining how continuous translocational motions (at different rates) are described by signers within the limited sign space. At the later stages, the research scope could potentially be extended looking into silent gestures produced by non-signers, and how the signed and gestural productions are comprehended.

I completed a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Cologne. My BA thesis, supervised by Gladys Tang, investigated non-manual markers of ironic expressions in HKSL. As for my MA thesis, supervised by Pamela Perniss, I examined the perception of iconicity in HKSL signs by signers and non-signers. I have been interested in iconicity and its interaction with different levels of multimodal language representation and interpretation ever since.