Sign Language & Linguistics - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2025

Topic is often marked only by prosody across languages. In sign languages, prosody is expressed by features similar to those in speech: i.e., sign duration, velocity and amplitude of movement (cf. slope and range of pitch). Topicalized signs usually occur sentence-initially, are followed by a pause, and may show longer duration than nontopics. We used pausing and duration characteristics to resolve a puzzle concerning the status of OSV sentences in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS): are they a nonmanually unmarked variant of non-manually marked topic sentences (O,SV), or are they a within-clause variant of the basic SOV order serving an as-yet-unknown discourse function? We investigated the temporal parameters of prosodic cues of 160 sentences produced by a fluent ÖGS signer: 40 in each of four conditions — SOV, OSV, S,OV, and O,SV. Overt topic marking effects on signing dynamics consisted of (1) lengthening of the sentence-initial topic phrases, causing a delay of the onset of the argument following the topic-marked item, and (2) a shortened duration of the noun phrase following the topic-marked item. Critically, the initial argument of OSV sentences did not show these prosodic cues, indicating that the initial argument O is not treated as being the same kind of topic as in the non-manually marked O,SV sentences. In accordance with the previous literature on pausing and lack thereof, we suggest that OSV might be akin to spoken German scrambling (within-clause movement), although the function performed remains to be investigated. The findings characterize parameters of temporal structure in the physical markers of topic in ÖGS and point to cross-linguistic variability in prosodic marking for topicalized structures.

This paper explores the morphology and the licensing conditions of a particular type of indefinite pronouns, referred to as quex-indefinites, which are morphologically identical or closely related to question words. We present findings from two studies investigating these forms in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). The first study is based on elicitation with three LSC consultants, while the second is an online experiment which collected judgments from 50 deaf LSC signers. Our research reveals that LSC quex-indefinites may be either identical to or resemble question words and identifies the semantic categories and environments that allow them. Specifically, quex-indefinites in LSC are possible in the categories of person, quantity, cause, and time. The licensing environments include polar questions, antecedents of conditionals, positive episodic sentences, and some modal environments. This study provides the first description of quex-indefinites in a sign language, contributing to the understanding of the affinity between indefinite and interrogative pronouns.

This paper presents the first corpus-driven linguistic description of South African Sign Language (SASL) and the first exploration of the structure of simple declarative clauses in SASL. Using a corpus of 40 narratives of 25 signers from three South African provinces, the study finds that SASL exhibits a basic SVO clause structure, but that the most common clause structure is SV. The study also presents evidence of the existence of the null copula in SASL, and finds that SASL exhibits a high tolerance for argument ellipsis. With the exception of their generalisations in terms of locative clauses, the study finds that Napoli and Sutton-Spence’s (2014) generalisations regarding sign language syntax hold true for naturalistic narrative discourse in SASL. Finally, the study supports the claim that SASL is a single sign language in terms of its syntactic patterns, despite regional lexical variation.