ii iii Als meu pares, al Cesc i a les comunitats sordes d"arreu. Cloc els ulls i sé que no hi ha res més bonic, quan aquest gest és sincer,que dar, cada ú, un xic. EULÀLIA RIBERA I LLONCH v AcknowledgmentsThe point of departure of this journey may be found at different moments: when my neighbour told me about an association for deaf people in Sabadell where she was learning sign language and recommended me the book Le cri de la Mouette by Emmanuelle Laborit; when I started studying for my doctorate and enrolled in a course called L'estructura de les llengües naturals de signes taught by Josep Quer at the Universitat de Barcelona; or also when I started teaching sign language linguistics and working at the Catalan Federation for the Deaf. These three starting points led me to meet many people who, in some way or other, have influenced the path I have taken and shaped this adventure. I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge them now. Josep Quer, my supervisor, is a wonderful linguist, as well as one of the nicest people I have ever met. He introduced me to sign language linguistics and has been on this path since the very beginning. He made me realise that when doing sign language linguistics, formal analyses can be much more interesting (and fun!) than doing WYSIWYG. I want to thank him for leaving me all the space I needed, for letting me wander with the data and for never pushing me in any specific direction, but for constantly reminding me that all the ideas must be well connected, while always thinking about new paths of research in such a positive way. As I said after my MA defence, I hope that this is only the beginning. Always ready to support me on all levels, Berit Gehrke and Alexandra Spalek were the perfect comrades from the very beginning of this journey and they deserve special credit. Berit was always ready to explain linguistic problems with which I was stuck with, help organise parts of this dissertation, listen to my existential doubts and organise barbecues and 80"s movies night when I thought my social skills had started waning. Being very close to Alexandra and after our endless discussions, I managed to understand what formal linguistics and doing a PhD were about. If it hadn"t been for them, I would never have reached my current level of understanding. And, most importantly, we wouldn"t have our amazing blog! Danke schön, my friends!! Most of the last four years were shared with the LSC linguists at the UPF and at the UB, with whom we always travelled on the same thematic journey. Celia Alba, Delfina Aliaga, Santi Frigola, Guillem Massó, Marta Mosella, Josep Quer, Joana Rosselló, and Raquel Santiago, many thanks for every single discussion about LSC and sign language in general. You have also been the perfect fellow travellers around Marrakesh, Vitoria, Lille, London and Venice! Lali Ribera"s dedication and enthusiasm for life is a model to me. Many thanks for letting me start this dissertation with one of your beautiful verses.And as if my work in Barcelona was not already intere...

This article proposes that at least two agent-backgrounding operations with different syntactic and semantic properties have to be distinguished in Catalan Sign Language (LSC): the high-locus construction and the nonagreeing central construction. We show that the high-locus construction is a transitive structure with a nonspecific subject. We propose to analyze this construction as involving a null pro-subject, licensed by agreement and interpreted as an impersonal third plural, as in other agent-backgrounding constructions with an impersonal third plural subject, which are crosslinguistically restricted to human interpretation. We propose that the non agreeing construction is an intransitivized verb form that allows passive interpretations with agents and causes and anticausative interpretations comparable to middle voice.*

Bringing together the areas of sign language semantics-pragmatics interface and discourse reference, this article offers a description of how indefiniteness and (non‑)specificity is encoded in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). By using a combined methodology of corpus data and grammatical tests, the present study shows that the encoding of indefiniteness and specificity in LSC is achieved by three main means, namely lexical signs, the use of nonmanuals, and the use of signing space. The basic primitives required to analyze specificity in LSC comprise wide scope, epistemicity, and partitivity. This article proposes an analysis of the use of signing space in contributing meaning and provides insights into the characterization of the abstract import of signing space.

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