ACLC Researcher Roland Pfau has been awarded an NWO Free Competition Grant
Argument structure in three sign languages: typological and theoretical aspects
Sign language typology is a young research field with two related goals. First, sign languages (SLs) are compared to spoken languages with respect to certain grammatical features to scrutinize which typological distinctions are valid across modalities. Second, SLs are compared to each other to further investigate whether they differ along similar lines as spoken languages do. In this project, both types of typological comparison are applied to the area of argument structure (AS).
Verbs in all natural languages must be specified for how many participants (subject, object) they require; compare e.g. Peter laughed with the ungrammatical Peter visited. Interestingly, a given verb may be variable with respect to its AS; compare Peter broke the window to The window broke. In addition, there are syntactic and morphological means to change AS, e.g. in a passive construction (e.g. He was visited). While AS is well studied for many spoken languages, very little is known about what verb classes exist in SLs and whether SLs employ systematic AS-changing strategies. This project sets out to fill this gap by providing the first cross-linguistic study on AS in SLs. In three sub-projects, we will study AS in three unrelated SLs (SL of the Netherlands, German SL, and Russian SL), by means of corpus analysis and data elicitation, to (i) provide a cross-modal and intra-modal typological comparison and (ii) to evaluate the applicability of existing theoretical accounts to SLs.