Foreground and background in Russian Sign Language narratives: the role of aspect and actionality

Abstract

The paper explores the role of aspect and actionality in foregrounding and backgrounding of clauses in Russian Sign Language narratives. Corpus study shows similarities to functions of aspectual markers and actionality in spoken languages. Besides grammatical markers and predicate types, non-manual marking and prosodic features of verbal sign can contribute to clause foregrounding and backgrounding.