Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2015

We aim to demonstrate the importance of defining linguistic phenomena by using constructed action or CA (i.e. a stretch of discourse that represents one role or combination of roles depicting actions, utterances, thought, attitudes and/or feelings of one or more referents) as an example. The problem is that different assumptions about CA have led to some apparent contradictions about the nature and characteristics of this phenomenon. Based on observations and analyses of British Sign Language narrative data, we outline criteria and recommendations for defining and annotating CA. We show that, in carefully defining the phenomenon in question and providing criteria for its identification, applying these criteria to usage data leads to emergence of particular types of CA. We also show how identifying these types can help resolve some of the apparent contradictions in the literature.

In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of weak hand holds based on corpus data. We include both a cross-linguistic analysis of these holds in narrative data from Russian Sign Language (RSL) and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), and a language-internal, cross-genre analysis comparing NGT narrative and conversational data. We classified the functions of all holds found in two corpora of RSL and NGT, and analyzed their formal characteristics. We found that holds in RSL and NGT have similar functions. However, holds are significantly more frequent in RSL than in NGT. In addition, we found that the distribution of holds across different functions varies between different genres in NGT. The similarities between RSL and NGT in the domain of holds may be attributed to modality effects. The differences in frequency of holds ask for a language-specific explanation, and we discuss several possible scenarios.

This paper presents one of the first studies on Georgian Sign Language (gesl), a sign language that has not previously been taken into consideration in typological research on sign languages. We focus on three types of indirect object markers, that is, auxiliary-like elements that introduce an additional argument. We discuss four markers in total. Interestingly, three of these markers do not only introduce an argument but also come with additional semantics, namely respect, disrespect, and causation. It will further be shown that the presence of an indirect object marker frees the word order in the sentence.