Research on spoken languages has shown that response particles may indicate the truth of a previous utterance or the polarity of the response. In responses to negative antecedents, the two functions come apart and particles become ambiguous. We present the first quantitative study on response strategies in sign languages by discussing data from a production experiment in German Sign Language ( Deutsche Geb & auml;rdensprache; DGS). The results indicate that DGS does not exploit the potential of simultaneous manual and nonmanual strategies to disambiguate responses. Still, the type of articulator influences the choice of response element. We propose an optimality-theoretic model to account for the role of articulator type, the disambiguation potential, and the morphosyntax of response elements in DGS.

Visual manifestations of an object that moves from one place to another are common in sign languages. Here, we offer an overview of techniques for conveying motion of an entity based on an examination of storytelling and poetry in seven sign languages. The signer can use embodiment and/or classifiers to show translocating movement of an object, or they can adjust the dynamic properties of signs themselves, including the size of the signing space, rate of movement, trilled motion of manuals and nonmanuals, repetition, and adding a zigzag component to the movement path. Additionally, we found one technique in German Sign Language (DGS) that uses a manual sign to indicate great speed or movement covering a large distance.

This paper has two objectives: we provide a detailed description of the DGS corpus, the largest existing collection of German Sign Language (DGS) data, and we show how such a corpus may be and already has been used as a resource for linguistic research in academic settings. In the first part, we describe where and how the Public DGS Corpus can be accessed, the types of elicitation tasks and formats that were used for data collection, and the regional and sociolinguistic background of the participants. Taking into account which phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical information has been annotated thus far, we then make suggestions for a wide range of applications of the corpus in phonetic, morphological, syntactic, information structural, sociolinguistic, and typological studies of DGS. Lastly, we summarize the methodologies and results of selected research projects that are based on the DGS corpus.

Adjectives are often identified via notional or even translational criteria in sign language research, which reflects a lack of formal criteria for identifying this part of speech in the field. This paper presents the results of a guided production task investigating the conservative hypothesis that ASL has a small, closed adjective class consisting only of terms for dimension, age, value, and color. Evidence from the syntactic distribution of these core properties compared to non-core properties will be presented to refute the initial hypothesis and show that ASL has an open adjective class. Its members are characterized by their ability to occur as prenominal modifiers without function-indicating morphosyntax. The semantic distinction between core and peripheral adjectives is nonetheless reflected in a significant preference for core adjectives to be used as modifiers rather than as sentential predicates. Postnominal property signs are analyzed as (in most cases) reduced relative clauses. I further suggest that prototypically verbal signs can be used as prenominal modifiers when they are embedded in reduced relative clauses.

The visual-gestural modality affords its users simultaneous movement of several independent articulators and thus lends itself to simultaneous encoding of information. Much research has focused on the fact that sign languages coordinate two manual articulators in addition to a range of non-manual articulators to present different types of linguistic information simultaneously, from phonological contrasts to inflection, spatial relations, and information structure. Children and adults acquiring a signed language arguably thus need to comprehend and produce simultaneous structures to a greater extent than individuals acquiring a spoken language. In this paper, we discuss the simultaneous encoding that is found in emerging and established sign languages; we also discuss places where sign languages are unexpectedly sequential. We explore potential constraints on simultaneity in cognition and motor coordination that might impact the acquisition and use of simultaneous structures.

Adjectives are often identified via notional or even translational criteria in sign language research, which reflects a lack of formal criteria for identifying this part of speech in the field. This paper presents the results of a guided production task investigating the conservative hypothesis that ASL has a small, closed adjective class consisting only of terms for dimension, age, value, and color. Evidence from the syntactic distribution of these core properties compared to non-core properties will be presented to refute the initial hypothesis and show that ASL has an open adjective class. Its members are characterized by their ability to occur as prenominal modifiers without function-indicating morphosyntax. The semantic distinction between core and peripheral adjectives is nonetheless reflected in a significant preference for core adjectives to be used as modifiers rather than as sentential predicates. Postnominal property signs are analyzed as (in most cases) reduced relative clauses. I further suggest that prototypically verbal signs can be used as prenominal modifiers when they are embedded in reduced relative clauses.

Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which nonmanual articulators can echo manual movement. Given the prosodic properties of echoes (coordination of onset/offset and of dynamics such as speed) as well as general motoric coordination of various articulators in the human body, we expect that the mouth is not the only nonmanual articulator involved in echo phonology. In this study, we look at a fixed set of lexical items across 36 sign languages and establish that the head can echo manual movement with respect to timing and to the axis/axes of manual movement. We propose that what matters in echo phonology is the visual percept of temporally coordinated movement that repeats a salient movement property in such a way as to give the visual impression of a copy. Our findings suggest that echoes are not obligatory motor couplings of two or more articulators but may enhance phonological distinctions that are otherwise difficult to see.

This paper looks at the lexemes DONEα and DONEβ in the Public DGS Corpus to find out whether they have a tendency to occur more frequently in sentence-final position than elsewhere and are therefore good cues for identifying sentence boundaries in German Sign Language (DGS).Since the Public DGS Corpus does not contain annotations of sentence boundaries or continuous syntactic tagging, we used time-aligned German translations as provisional sentential units.DONEα and DONEβ were selected since the literature suggests that they are best analyzed as right-peripheral heads.Additionally, we compared the distribution of DONEα to that of ALREADYα, which served as a baseline.The results suggest that DONEα and DONEβ indeed occur more often at the end of a translation tag than elsewhere in DGS.A more detailed analysis of a randomly selected subset of tokens of DONEα and DONEβ revealed that some of their functions are associated more strongly with sentential boundaries than others.Restrictive focus and discourse marker uses occur more consistently in the final position than, e.g., aspectual uses.

Response elements (REs) like English yes and no fulfil two functions. They may affirm or reject a previous utterance, or they may indicate that the response to the previous utterance has positive or negative polarity. In responses to negative sentences, these two functions come apart. Spoken languages investigated so far seem to display different preferences for the interpretation of REs to signal either the positive/negative polarity of the response clause or the affirmation/rejection of the truth of the previous utterance. The present paper investigates the meaning and use of REs in German Sign Language (DGS). We present the results of a discourse completion experiment in DGS, which is the first quantitative study of the response system of a sign language, and provide a preliminary theoretical analysis of this system. Sign languages are of particular interest in this context since they systematically use multiple articulatory channels, which can, in principle, encode truth and polarity at the same time. The results show that DGS employs manual and non-manual REs which encode both truth and polarity, i.e. are ambiguous, as well as REs that encode only truth. The ambiguous REs are used more often to encode truth than polarity, and are rarely disambiguated by simultaneous non-manual REs. Hence, DGS does not use the potential made available by the visual-gestural modality in the domain of response strategies.

The paper offers the first systematic investigation of iconic form-meaning mappings in the domain of speech act verbs in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and American Sign Language (ASL). It addresses the question of how pervasive the representation of linguistic action as oral speech is in sign languages. Using dictionary data coupled with consultant work, I show that oral speech forms the single most productive source of iconicity in NGT speech act verbs. This contrasts with ASL, which also draws on oral speech to encode linguistic action but to a significantly lesser degree than NGT. Depictions of oral speech may be metonymic, using mouth/jaw or tongue movement, or they may represent spoken language metaphorically via instantiations of the conduit metaphor and its sub-metaphor THE MOUTH IS A CONTAINER (FOR UTTERANCES). The second frequent motivation for iconic speech act verbs are hand movements or co-speech gestures that accompany a linguistic act. I further show that the source of iconicity correlates with how strongly a given SAV is associated with language use. Lastly, I provide a historical framework against which to interpret the frequent representation of linguistic action in terms of oral speech. I propose that different strategies for lexical borrowing coupled with a societal bias against spoken English in the American Deaf community may have discouraged the encoding of speech act verbs via oral speech in ASL.

Background. Concealed causatives [1] such as resultatives (1a) and lexical causatives (1b) exhibit a form-meaning mismatch: They describe situations in which an agent intentionally brings about an immediate change of state in an(other) entity, yet the causative meaning component is not encoded in an overt morpheme. Typically, covert causatives cannot felicitously describe indirect causation scenarios such as (1), where a periphrastic causative (1c) is acceptable.

Taboo terms offer a playground for linguistic creativity in language after language, and sign languages form no exception. The present paper offers the first investigation of taboo terms in sign languages from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We analyze the linguistic mechanisms that introduce offense, focusing on the combined effects of cognitive metonymy and iconicity. Using the Think Aloud Protocol, we elicited offensive or crass signs and dysphemisms from nine signers. We find that German Sign Language uses a variety of linguistic means to introduce and enhance offense, many of which rely on iconic properties of the taboo sign. In conjunction with cross-linguistically common metonymic word-formation strategies, the degree of visual explicitness of a sign increases its potential to offend. Semantically similar taboo signs based on the same metonymic anchor but differing in their degree of iconicity also differ in offensiveness. This allows for creating dysphemisms and euphemisms via phonological changes to a sign. We further show that embodiment creates modality-enhanced 'vicarious embarrassment' in the viewer that results in the respective signs being judged obscene or offensive. Further, lexical blending and non-manual enhancement play a role in the creation of dysphemisms in DGS. Lastly, we propose that iconicity as a cognitive structuring principle of linguistic expressions constrains the possible semantic extensions of iconic taboo terms.

Investigating the syntactic structure of utterances with multiple predicates in sign languages requires a clear understanding of how many finite and infinitival clauses they contain and which syntactic dependencies exist between them. Since the sign language literature currently lacks a standardized methodology for identifying clause boundaries, this paper discusses syntactico-semantic diagnostics of clausehood and clause size and analyzes their applicability to American Sign Language (ASL) and German Sign Language (DGS). First, I discuss tests that distinguish coordinated clauses from dependent clause structures; specifically negation, A’-movement, and subject pronoun copy. Limitations of 'wh'- and topic fronting as clausehood diagnostics are identified and a modified subject pronoun copy test is proposed. Determining whether a given utterance contains coordinated or dependent clauses is only half the battle, however; we also want to know the approximate “size” of the constituent an embedded predicate projects. The present study takes a first pass at filling this gap by introducing rightward 'wh'-movement and confirming center-embedding as diagnostics that can discriminate between finite and infinitival clauses in signed languages. Based on acceptability judgments from 13 native signers of DGS and ASL, I show that 'wh'-subjects can move across infinitival control complements and the secondary predicates of resultative constructions, but they cannot cross a finite complement clause. The diagnostic thus provides empirical evidence for the existence of various types of embedded clauses in signed languages that differ in their functional structure.

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ones (6b), as well as for kinship terms (6c, 6d) and part-whole relations with animate (6e) and inanimate possessors (6f). Juxtaposing nominal possessors and possessums in NGT then does not seem to be restricted to alienable or inalienable possession. [VanDale COACH] (6) a. DUTCH NATIONAL-TEAM COACH INDEX3 EVERYBODY ALWAYS CRITICISE3 'The coach of the Dutch national (soccer) team is always criticised by everybody.' q b. THIS MEETING GOAL WHAT [VanDale DOEL] 'What is the goal of this meeting?' c. BEST FRIEND FATHER [recording FAMILY TREE] 'the father of (your) best friend' d. SON UNCLE DEAD [recording FAMILY TREE] '(Your) uncle's son is dead.' [VanDale ANGST/ANGSTIG] e. PHOTO CL:rectangular INDEX3 WOMAN FACE FEAR 'On the photo you can see the fear on the face of the woman.' f. HEARING-AID BATTERY LOW [VanDale BATTERIJ] 'The battery of the hearing aid is low.' Concerning the insertion of a possessive marker between possessor and possessum, the data are less clear. Only in the data elicited in relation to kinship did instances of such insertion of an index pronoun occur, as exemplified below. (7) a. BEST FRIEND INDEX3 MOTHER [recording FAMILY TREE] 'the mother of (your) best friend' b. BEST FRIEND INDEX3 PARENTS [recording FAMILY TREE] 'the parents of (your) best friend' [recording FAMILY TREE] c. OLDEST UNCLE INDEX3, SPOUSE DEAD '(My) oldest uncle's wife is dead.' d. AUNT INDEX3, HUSBAND DEAD [recording FAMILY TREE] '(My) aunt's husband is dead.' However, sentences (7c) and (7d) exhibit signs of the possessors forming part of a different constituent than the possessum (indicated here with a comma). The pronominal possessor is accompanied by a headnod followed by a small pause, then for the possessums SPOUSE and HUSBAND, the chin is lifted again. Non-manual marking such 35 Texas Linguistics Forum Proceedings from the 13th meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society

This paper undertakes a direct comparison between two methodologies for getting at semantic intuitions: (i) validity judgments, where subjects judge the validity of arguments, e.g. There are three bananas; therefore there are at least three bananas, and (ii) picture verification tasks (also known as ‘truth judgment tasks’), in which, for example, one sees a picture of three bananas and judges a statement like There are at least three bananas. It has been suggested that validity judgment tasks are more sensitive to ignorance implicatures than picture verification tasks, but these two methods have not been compared directly using comparable stimuli. The present work aims to close that gap. The results show that validity judgment tasks do not in fact robustly pick up on ignorance implicatures, so they cannot be relied upon for that, although both validity judgment tasks and truth value judgment tasks are sensitive to violations of particularly strong pragmatic requirements. In general, the two kinds of tasks gave quite similar results. This raises the question of why validity judgment tasks sometimes pick up on ignorance implicatures and sometimes do not.