Acceptability Judgments in Sign Linguistics

Kimmelman, Vadim

doi:10.1017/9781108569620.022

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 67 publications

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“…Generally, in generative studies on both spoken and sign languages, data comes mainly from the intuitions of native speakers; i.e., from formal and informal acceptability judgements by native speakers and signers. The reliability of this method has been experimentally confirmed for both spoken languages (Schütze & Sprouse 2014;Sprouse et al 2018;Sprouse 2018) and sign languages (Kimmelman 2021). The experiments were designed in order to answer our research questions:…”

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy

Colasanti

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Recently, gestures have been a topic of much interest in formal linguistics, especially with respect to their semantic contribution (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Schlenker 2018a; Esipova 2019a; i.a.). A consistent observation within this literature is that the semantic content of gestures can be integrated into the meaning of spoken utterances. One way to explain the semantic contribution of gestures is to treat them as part of the grammar: namely, if gesture can participate in semantic relations, it is because they appear in syntactic representations (Jouitteau 2004; 2007; Sailor & Colasanti 2020; Colasanti 2021a; b; to appear). Following this previous literature, I present some preliminary data on the conventionalised co-speech gesture Mano a Borsa (MAB; i.e. 🤌🏽 ‘pursed hand’ in Neapolitan, a southern Italo-Romance language. Based on original fieldwork with 96 speakers in Naples, I argue that MAB is the realisation of a particular flavour of interrogative C, consistent with its preference for aligning with the beginning of the clause in wh-interrogatives, even in wh-in-situ contexts. In other words, I argue that MAB exhibits behaviour typical of a wh-question morpheme, albeit one whose PF realisation happens to be gestural rather than spoken. 

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Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy

Colasanti

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Subject agreement in control and modal constructions in Russian Sign Language

Khristoforova

2023

SL&L

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The present research combines three fields of inquiry in sign language linguistics: verbal agreement, person features, and syntactic complexity. These topics have previously been addressed in isolation, but little is known about their interaction. This study attempts to fill this gap by investigating subject agreement in complement clauses in Russian Sign Language. By means of corpus investigation and grammaticality judgments, I found that subject agreement in clausal complements of the control predicates try, love, want, begin, and modal can may be deficient – in particular, it can be reduced to the forms identical to first-person marking even in the case of a third-person subject controller. Deficient subject agreement in complement clauses is thus reminiscent of non-finite verbal forms in spoken languages. I further argue that the choice of first-person forms in deficient agreement reveals a default status of first person in sign languages, which is consistent with proposals regarding the modality-specific properties of first-person reference in these languages.

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Acceptability Judgments in Sign Linguistics

Cited by 2 publications

References 67 publications

Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy

Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy

Subject agreement in control and modal constructions in Russian Sign Language

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