This article describes the procedures employed during the development of the first comprehensive machine-readable Turkish Sign Language (TiD) 1 resource: a bilingual lexical database and a parallel corpus between Turkish and TiD. In addition to sign language specific annotations (such as non-manual markers, classifiers and buoys) following the recently introduced TiD knowledge representation (Eryiğit et al. 2016), the parallel corpus contains also annotations of dependency relations, which makes it the first parallel treebank between a sign language and an auditory-vocal language.

This study investigates two flavors of the necessity modal sign NECESSARY in TİD and investigates their semantic and syntactic properties and how these properties interact. First, the modal flavors of this modal sign were identified through the contexts they occur in, based on the analysis by Kratzer (1981, 1991). Epistemic and deontic flavors of modality were searched for in the data, which was collected by spontaneous and semistructured elicitation tasks. Then, questionnaires that involve felicity and grammaticality judgment tasks were carried out to explore the semantic and syntactic properties of these modal signs in more detail. A total of 29 TİD signers participated in the data collection. The results of this investigation show that (i) NECESSARY is a necessity modal sign which has both epistemic and deontic interpretations, (ii) NECESSARY has a restricted syntactic position in a clause, (iii) non-manual markers differentiate between the epistemic and deontic interpretations of NECESSARY, which indicates that non-manual markers in TİD have both syntactic and prosodic functions.

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.