The title of my PhD-project is "Morphological reduplication in Sign Language of the Netherlands: A typological and theoretical perspective". This study will provide the first comprehensive description of morphological reduplication in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), by addressing in detail how reduplication affects nouns (plural marking) and verbs (aspectual and reciprocal marking) in NGT, also taking into account possible phonological and morphosyntactic restrictions on reduplication. To investigate this, analysis of corpus data is combined with data elicitation. Beyond description, we offer a typological and theoretical perspective on the phenomenon. First, results will be compared to earlier findings from both sign and spoken languages. Second, the patterns will be analyzed within Optimality Theory (OT), a framework that has frequently been used to formalize findings from spoken languages, while as of yet only a few OT-analyses of sign languages are available.
I started this PhD-project in September 2019. The project is supervised by dr. Roland Pfau and dr. Silke Hamann.
Linguistic structure of sign languages, cross-modal typology, modality-effects on grammar
2014-2017: BA Dutch Language & Culture, specialization Linguistics, University of Amsterdam (cum laude).
2017-2019: Research MA Linguistics, specialization Sign Linguistics, University of Amsterdam (cum laude).
Thesis: The marking of imperatives in Sign Language of the Netherlands (grade: 9.0).