The phonological and semantic bifurcation of the functions of an articulator: HEAD in questions in Turkish Sign Language

In this article, we analyse the role of the head in content questions and polar questions in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili — TİD). We claim that the head not only robustly marks the difference between these two types, but in addition marks an utterance as having interrogative mood. We show that the two functions, the overarching category interrogative mood and the subtypes of interrogatives, have separate phonological exponents, both of which are expressed simultaneously by a single articulator, the head.