Deontic and epistemic necessity in Turkish sign language (TİD)

Abstract

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.

Modal signs and scope relations in TID

“…There are a few studies on TİD modal root or deontic signs: POSITIVE (ability), FREE (permission) and OBLIGED (obligation) (Dikyuva, Makaroglu, and Arık 2017); NECESSARY (necessity) (Gökgöz 2009;Özkul 2016;Dikyuva, Makaroglu, and Arık 2017) and HAVE TO (obligation, necessity) (Gökgöz 2009). In fact, there is a brief mention of epistemic in Gökgöz (2009) and testing NECESSARY in epistemic contexts by Özkul (2016).…”