Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2018

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.

In this paper, we examine agent backgrounding in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Specifically, we are interested in identifying and describing the strategies used by LIS signers to reduce referentiality. On the basis of low-referential contexts (cf. questionnaire in the Introduction chapter), we recorded target sentences containing potential markers of agent backgrounding and asked three LIS native signers to provide felicity judgments on them using a 7-point scale. We discuss agent-backgrounding strategies of different types: (i) manual, (ii) non-manual, and (iii) syntactic. Overall, our study shows that the combination of raised eyebrows and mouth-corners down associated with the existential quantifier someone and the sign person makes the agent-backgrounding reading more prominent. Other strategies that can be used in LIS to reduce referentiality are free relatives, perspective shift, and null subject. We also investigate in more detail the semantic status of someone, person, and the null subject through well-established tests from the literature.

This paper investigates agent-backgrounding constructions in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). TİD displays many of the agent-backgrounding strategies reported in the literature that signed (and spoken) languages employ (Barberà & Cabredo Hofherr, this volume). Use of non-specific indefinite pronominals is a major strategy, and this paper is the first study that identifies these forms in TİD. Moreover, we show that TİD has ways of marking clusivity distinctions of indefinite arguments, and has a special sign that derives exclusive indefinite pronominals, other. We argue that (i) whereas lateral-high R-locus is unambiguously associated with non-specificity, non-high (lateral and central) loci are underspecified in terms of specificity; (ii) the R-locus of indefinite arguments observed in agent-backgrounding contexts in TİD consists of two spatial features [+high] and [+lateral] which express non-specificity and exclusivity. This study further shows that clusivity, usually associated with personal pronouns, must be extended to indefinite pronouns.

This paper discusses R-impersonals in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). As evidenced in our questionnaire and conversation data, R-impersonals in HKSL typically make use of null forms, the non-specific indefinite determiner (i.e., onedet-path (someone)/onedet-path (anyone)), distinguished by non-manual markers), and, occasionally, the Chinese character sign human/person. HKSL does not show impersonal uses of personal pronouns (e.g., they, you) which are commonly found in spoken languages. The nominal strategies are determined by the contexts and the referential properties of the impersonal referents, and they differ in the use of space in representing the impersonal referents in subsequent discourse. R-impersonal referents encoded by onedet-path (someone)/onedet-path (anyone) are associated with an area of the upper part of the ipsilateral side of the signing space, but they can still be assigned to a specific locus if the subsequent discourse requires locative information. Impersonal referents introduced by null forms or the Chinese character sign human/person are typically not spatially anchored.

The present paper offers a first systematic approach to the expression of impersonal human reference in French Sign Language (LSF). It extends and deepens a prior study carried out by the authors on the basis of a large scale discourse corpus. The description proposed here is based primarily on data elicited through a specialised questionnaire on impersonal human reference (Barberà & Cabredo Hofherr, this volume), initially developed for spoken languages and adapted for sign languages. The strategies revealed are compared with those discussed in our prior study. We begin with a brief review of the literature on impersonal human reference in spoken and sign languages, and a presentation of our theoretical framework for the analysis of LSF. We then elaborate on our methodology and the issues raised by the elicitation protocol adopted, from initial stages of its preparation to the representation of our data. We finally present and discuss the main strategies we highlighted for the expression of impersonal reference in LSF.

This paper examines backgrounding strategies for human agents in Catalan Sign Language, that is, constructions featuring human agents that are non-referential. We identify and analyze four types of agent-backgrounding strategies: subjectless constructions, indefinite pronouns, the impersonal axis, and general nouns. Extending on previous work, we offer a description and a semantico-pragmatic analysis of each construction.

This paper presents a semiotic study of the distribution of a type of size depiction in lexical signs in six sign languages. Recently, a growing number of studies are focusing on the distribution of two representation techniques, i.e. the use of entity handshapes and handling handshapes for the depiction of hand-held tools (e.g. Ortega et al. 2014). Padden et al. (2013) find that there is cross-linguistic variation in the use of this pair of representation techniques. This study looks at variation in a representation technique that has not been systematically studied before, i.e. the delimitation of a stretch of space to depict the size of a referent, or space-based distance for size depiction. It considers the question whether the cross-linguistic variation in the use of this representation technique is governed by language-specific patterning as well (cf. Padden et al. 2013).

This study quantifies and compares the occurrence of space-based distance for size depiction in the lexicons of six sign languages, three of Western European origin, and three of West African origin. It finds that sign languages differ significantly from each other in their frequency of use of this depiction type. This result thus corroborates that the selection and distribution of representation techniques does not solely depend on features of the depicted image, but also on language-specific patterning in the distribution of representation techniques, and it adds another dimension of iconic depiction in which sign languages may vary from each other (in addition to the entity/handling handshape distinction). Moreover, the results appear to be areally defined, with the three European languages using this representation technique significantly more often than the three African languages.

Theories of pronominal strength (e.g., Cardinaletti & Starke 1999) lead one to expect that sign language, just like spoken language, can have morphologically distinct strong pronominals. We suggest that American Sign Language (ASL) and French Sign Language (LSF) might have such pronominals, characterized here by the fact that they may associate with only even in the absence of prosodically marked focus.