A descriptive grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands

Abstract

A descriptive grammar of Sign Language of the NetherlandsSign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT) is a minority language in the Netherlands, but has only recently gained legal recognition of this status. It is estimated that 60,000 people in the Netherlands sign NGT, of whom 10,000 are early onset deaf signers.This book is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of NGT. It offers a detailed description of its phonology, morphology, and selected aspects of its syntax. Whenever possible, the linguistic phenomena are illustrated by naturalistic corpus data. The grammatical description is complemented by a brief overview of the socio-historical background of NGT and of the Dutch sign language community.The European SIGN-HUB project, of which this dissertation is a result, hosts a platform where a digital version of this grammar can be found, along with video fragments providing illustrations of many of the linguistic characteristics addressed in the book: www.sign-hub.eu/grammar. This resource may be used for cross-linguistic research, for the development of NGT acquisition materials, and as a reference work.

Mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages: typology, ecology and ideology

“…This does not have a clear link to oralist practices but may be an outcome of competition arising from more sign language-based education and linguistic hygiene. For example, in NGT there are two basic constituent orders, SOV and SVO (Klomp 2021); therefore, a morpho-syntactic mouthing construction would be in competition with at least two other constructions with dedicated sequential positions for object signs. Example (7) (repeated below as ( 10)) shows the mouthing construction where the mouthing, 'bread', that co-occurs with a manual sign, 'to eat', is the object of that verb.…”

As strong as an NPI in LSF, NGT and LIS

“…A similar situation is found for American Sign Language (Abner & Wilbur 2017, but see Schlenker 2018 for some potential cases of ANY as an NPI). Concerning the three languages under investigation in this study, recently published grammars do not discuss any clear case of NPIs either (see Millet (2019) for LSF, Klomp (2021) for NGT and Branchini & Mantovan (2020) for LIS). Our own investigation confirms that no obvious equivalent of any can be found in these three languages.…”

The Acquisition of Strategies to Express Plurality in Hearing Second Language Learners of Sign Language of the Netherlands

“…Classifier predicates consist of a stem (a verb of movement or location) combined with a classifier handshape that signals that the referent has certain salient characteristics, such as size and shape, or that the referent belongs to a class of semantically related items. This group of elements is commonly categorized into three subclasses: entity classifiers (including static size and shape specifiers), handle classifiers, and body part classifiers (Klomp 2021;Zwitserlood, 2003). 6 Entity classifier predicates (Zwitserlood, 2012) or depicting signs (Liddell, 2003) 7 represent a whole entity, such as a vehicle (Figure 6a), a person (Figure 6b and c), or an animal.…”

“…6 To contextualize the present study, I will elaborate on entity classifiers and SASSes. For a full explanation on handle classifiers and body part classifiers, the reader is referred to Zwitserlood (2003) or Klomp (2021). 7 In the sign language literature the morphological status of these elements is hotly debated.…”

“…In previous literature on sign language reduplication, two types of reduplication have been distinguished: (i) reduplication of the noun at the same location, labeled simple reduplication (Figure 1a), and (ii) reduplication combined with a sideward movement, known as sideward reduplication (Figure 1b). Sideward reduplication, in turn, can be subdivided into a sideward reduplication without indicating spatial arrangement and sideward reduplication that combines with additional information regarding spatial arrangement (Klomp, 2021, p. 229). I will return to this issue later.…”