Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2022

Abstract

We report an experiment addressing the comprehension of LIS interrogatives in three adult populations with different times of exposure to sign language: native signers, early signers, and late signers. We investigate whether delayed exposure to language affects comprehension of interrogatives and whether there is an advantage for subject dependencies over object dependencies, as systematically reported for spoken languages. The answer to the first question is positive: there is evidence that natives outperform non-native signers, confirming permanent effects of delayed exposure to sign language even decades after childhood. However, the performance in subject interrogatives was lower than in object interrogatives in all groups of participants. We discuss several possible reasons for this unexpected finding.

Abstract

Adjectives are often identified via notional or even translational criteria in sign language research, which reflects a lack of formal criteria for identifying this part of speech in the field. This paper presents the results of a guided production task investigating the conservative hypothesis that ASL has a small, closed adjective class consisting only of terms for dimension, age, value, and color. Evidence from the syntactic distribution of these core properties compared to non-core properties will be presented to refute the initial hypothesis and show that ASL has an open adjective class. Its members are characterized by their ability to occur as prenominal modifiers without function-indicating morphosyntax. The semantic distinction between core and peripheral adjectives is nonetheless reflected in a significant preference for core adjectives to be used as modifiers rather than as sentential predicates. Postnominal property signs are analyzed as (in most cases) reduced relative clauses. I further suggest that prototypically verbal signs can be used as prenominal modifiers when they are embedded in reduced relative clauses.

Abstract

This paper investigates content questions and the paradigm of question words in Czech Sign Language (český znakový jazyk – ČZJ). While this topic has been investigated for a fair number of other sign languages, a comprehensive study for ČZJ is still missing. Our aim is to fill this gap. In the absence of a representative corpus for ČZJ, we use data from the most extensive electronic dictionary database (Dictio), developed at the Masaryk University in Brno. We offer a basic description of the ČZJ interrogative strategies for content questions. In doing so, we also situate the language within the typology of sign language interrogatives: we classify ČZJ as a language with a rich paradigm of question words, and we identify the basic syntactic position of question words as sentence-final. Furthermore, we outline three morphological types of ČZJ question words: simple, complex, and derived.

This article reviews Sign language acquisition by deaf and hearing children978-1-56368-554-5, $199.00$75.00$5.00