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.

The studies on how time is expressed in TİD have different results: Gökgöz (2009) proposes that head nod is a tense morpheme while Arık (2012) and Dikyuva et al. (2015) claim that TİD is a morphologically tenseless language. This study shows that TİD is a morphologically tenseless language based on the occurrence of head nod with different verb types. It is also proposed that tense of a sentence is expressed via time adverbials and shown which syntactic positions time adverbials occur in. Lastly, timelines in TİD, which are only reported on in a few studies, are described based on the placement of time adverbials in the signing space. It is also shown that different time spans require different timelines to be used.

In this paper, we test Bross and Hole's (2017) bodily-mapping hypothesis originally proposed for DGS. They found that operators with high scope (above T) are expressed using physically high articulators (mainly the eyebrows) and lower (IP-internal) categories are expressed manually in German Sign Language. In this way, scope is iconically mapped onto the signer's body (high scope = high articulator; low scope = low articulator). Additionally, they found that descending the scopal height of IP-internal categories, the higher ones (e. g., deontic modality) are concatenated from left to right and the lower ones (e. g., root modality) from right to left. Here, we put the bodily-mapping hypothesis to test by discussing the categories of epistemic (above T), deontic, and root modality (both below T) in Turkish Sign Language. Additionally, we investigate whether concatenation strategies for deontic and root modality differ. We show that, in Turkish Sign Language, epistemic modality, in contrast to deontic and root modality, requires nonmanual markings with the upper face, in line with the bodily-mapping hypothesis. Turkish Sign Language, however, differs from German Sign Language in that the former requires an additional manual modal sign for epistemic modality. We suggest two modeling possibilities to account for this finding: one assuming base-generation of the modals in their scope-taking position and one based on a movement account.

Sign languages have been reported to have manual signs that function as perfective morphemes (Fischer & Gough 1999; Meir 1999; Rathmann 2005; Duffy 2007; Zucchi et al. 2010). Turkish Sign Language (TİD) has also been claimed to have such morphemes (Zeshan 2003; Kubuş & Rathmann 2009; Dikyuva 2011; Gökgöz 2011; Karabüklü 2016) as well as a nonmanual completive marker (‘bn’) (Dikyuva 2011). This study shows that the nonmanual ‘bn’ is in fact a perfective morpheme. We examine its compatibility with different event types and furthermore show that TİD has a manual sign bı̇t (‘finish’) that is indeed the completive marker but with possibly unusual restrictions on its use. Based on their distribution, the current study distinguishes bı̇t and ‘bn’ as different morphemes even though they can co-occur. TİD is argued to be typologically different from other sign languages since it has both a nonmanual marker (‘bn’) for a perfective morpheme and a manual sign (bı̇t) with different selectional properties than the manual signs reported for other sign languages.