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Abstract
This paper contains the first description of impersonal reference in Russian Sign Language (RSL). Impersonal reference has been investigated using a variety of elicitation techniques. It has been found that RSL uses a variety of strategies, namely pro-drop, an indefinite pronoun someone, a plural pronoun ixpl, and probably a second-person pronoun ix2 in impersonal contexts. The impersonal strategies in RSL follow the general typological tendencies previously identified for spoken languages (Gast & Van der Auwera 2013), and do not show obvious modality effects (such as described by Barberà & Quer 2013). Some impersonal strategies show evidence of influence of spoken/written Russian in the form of borrowing and/or code-switching.
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