Fantastic ‘at leasts’ and how to sign them

Abstract

Scalar modifiers, such as the English at least, have been argued to have four different readings: a neutral, an epistemic, a concessive, and a qualifying reading. This paper investigates the expression of these four readings in German Sign Language against the background of the Bodily Mapping Hypothesis. This hypothesis states that there is a systematic mapping between the position of an operator in the syntactic structure and the height of the articulator expressing it: the higher in the structure an operator is located, the higher the body part used for its expression will be. It will be shown that the readings of ‘at least’ encoding CP-functions are expressed using upper face non-manual markings, while the neutral reading is expressed manually without any additional non-manuals—in line with the Bodily Mapping Hypothesis.