Synthesizing commentaries and responses

Lillo‐Martin, Diane; Quadros, Ronice Müller de; Pichler, Deborah Chen

doi:10.1075/lab.6.6.19lil

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…Note that from the translation of example ( 21), it is clear that the function of the fronted constituent GRANDMOTHER is contrastive focus, not topic. Chen Pichler (2010) also acknowledged this fact and compared her findings to those reported by Lillo-Martin & de Quadros (2005), to which we now turn. Lillo-Martin & de Quadros ( 2005) studied the acquisition of focus marking in ASL and Libras.…”

Section: Experimental Researchmentioning

confidence: 60%

Information structure

Kimmelman¹,

Pfau²

2021

The Routledge Handbook of Theoretical and Experimental Sign Language Research

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Information structure is a field of linguistics covered in numerous books and articles. Information structure in sign languages has also been investigated almost from the first days of sign linguistics; however, as is often the case, most of the available studies focus on a very small number of sign languages, and among these, American Sign Language (ASL) is the one most prominently represented. Nevertheless, some interesting results have been obtained that can be relevant for the theory of information structure in general.In this chapter, we are going to use the terminology commonly used in the information structure literature: in particular, topic, focus, contrast, and emphasis. More specific terms are explained throughout the chapter. A reader not familiar with the field of information structure is encouraged to consult Krifka (2008) for a concise and accessible overview.Recently, two handbook chapters devoted to information structure in sign languages have appeared: Wilbur (2012) and Kimmelman & Pfau (2016). Moreover, Kimmelman (2019) is a book-length study of information structure in sign languages, investigating information structure notions based on corpus data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and Russian Sign Language (RSL). In this chapter, we thus try to avoid overlap with these works to the extent possible and report new results and new perspectives on the topic. In addition, we go beyond previous overviews by also addressing generative approaches to certain aspects of information structure in sign languages. In Section 26.2, we discuss topic and focus marking in sign languages. Section 26.3 is devoted to recent studies that shed light on a number of particularly interesting phenomena, some of which appear to be modality-specific. In Section 26.4, we offer a brief overview of experimental research on information structure. Section 26.5 concludes the chapter. Information structure: description and formalizationWe start by providing an overview of how different types of topics (Section 26.2.1) and foci (Section 26.2.2) are marked in different sign languages. To that end, we address syntactic position, non-manual (prosodic) marking, and for foci also manual marking. As

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Section: Experimental Researchmentioning

confidence: 60%