Scope-taking strategies and the order of clausal categories in German Sign Language

Abstract

The scope order of clausal categories has been claimed to be universal. In this paper we adopt a universalist cartographic approach to clausal syntax. By discussing the categories of speech acts, evaluation, epistemic modality, scalarity, volition and deontic, as well as other kinds of modality, we illustrate a striking regularity in strategies of scope-taking in German Sign Language (DGS): the wider/higher the scope of a clausal operator, the more likely its expression will occur with a high body part by way of layering; namely, descending from the eyebrows to the lower face, tentatively to the shoulders, and finally switching to manual expressions. For intermediate operators a left-to-right concatenation strategy is employed, and low categories are expressed by way of a manual right-to-left concatenation strategy. Hence, we propose a highly regular natural mapping of the scope-order of clausal categories onto the body. This sort of mapping can also be observed in other sign languages and may turn out to be universal.

The Impact of Transitional Movements and Non-Manual Markings on the Disambiguation of Locally Ambiguous Argument Structures in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS)

“…The "extra" spatial dimensions of sign languages allow for a degree of simultaneity not possible with spoken language. Indeed, a number of descriptions of sign language grammars emphasize that sign language structures are organized more simultaneously compared to spoken languages, which are structured more serially (e.g., Bross & Hole, 2017;Wilbur, 2000). In particular, in sign languages different pieces of information can be provided in parallel using the non-manual and manual channels for sign production, which both perform important grammatical functions and are generally independent from each other, despite temporal alignments at the prosodic level (for the sign level, see Wilbur, 2015; for the sentence level, Wilbur, 2018).…”

Modal signs and scope relations in TID

“…In their study on German Sign Language (DGS), Bross and Hole (2017) focus, in the spirit of Cinque (1999), on the possible universal ordering of syntactic categories on the clausal spine. They claim that there is a general split between the expression of categories above and below tense in DGS.…”

“…Further descending the clausal spine and crossing tense, the lower categories, volition, deontic and root modality, find manual expression. Bross and Hole (2017) claim that the different syntactic heights of each of these three lower categories find overt realization in DGS through different concatenation strategies: While volitional verbs like PLAN or WISH systematically occur to the left of the vP in DGS (they 'concatenate from left to right' in their terminology), the position of deontic modals seems to vary (pre-or post-verbal), and root modals naturally occur in a position following the vP (i. e., root modals are expressed by a right-to-left concatenation strategy). Taken together, DGS presents the following pattern (tense added for orientation) (5).…”

“…This study is concerned with the expression of epistemic, deontic, and root modality in Turkish Sign Language (Türkİşaret Dili, TİD), a head-final language (Gökgöz 2011), and puts Bross and Hole's (2017) bodily-mapping hypothesis to the test. In Section 2, we briefly introduce the relevant modality terminology, in Section 3, we discuss the bodily-mapping hypothesis, and in Section 4, we briefly outline how the data were collected.…”

“…In Section 2, we briefly introduce the relevant modality terminology, in Section 3, we discuss the bodily-mapping hypothesis, and in Section 4, we briefly outline how the data were collected. In Section 5, we discuss data from TİD and compare them to the data from German Sign Language (DGS) (which is mixed-headed (Bross and Hole 2017)). The nonmanuals used with the three different modal flavors are discussed in Section 6.…”