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This paper reports on a comparison of word order issues, and more specifically on the order of the verb and its arguments, in two unrelated sign languages: South African Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language. The study comprises the first part of a larger project in which a number of grammatical mechanisms and structures are compared across the two sign languages, using a corpus consisting of similar VGT and SASL-data of a various nature. The overall goal of the project is to contribute to a further understanding of the issue of the degree of similarity across unrelated sign languages. However, the different studies also mean a further exploration of the grammars of the two languages involved. In this paper the focus is on the analysis of isolated declarative sentences elicited by means of pictures. The results yield some interesting similarities across all signers but also indicate that — especially with regard to constituent order — there are important differences between the two languages.

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In this paper, we report interview data from 14 Deaf leaders across seven countries (Australia,

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The study reported on in this dissertation represents the first larger-scale research project on the grammar of Flemish-Belgian Sign Language. 1 Within the framework of the project a corpus consisting of six hours of spontaneous sign language data -four hours of dialogues and two hours of monologues -produced by ten (near)native signers, at the time of the research between 30 and 83 years old, was composed, transcribed and translated. The corpus served as a basis for the study of two different but related central research topics: the expression of the relationship between a verb and its arguments and 'basic word order'. The decision to select these particular topics and the rather descriptive approach was determined by the state of affairs of the research on the grammatical structure of Flemish-Belgian Sign Language. Considering the very limited number of existing research results it seemed appropriate to analyse and describe a relatively large number of different morphosyntactic mechanisms.With regard to the first central research topic -the expression of the relationship between the verb and its arguments -the actual role of word order is looked into. Close attention is furthermore paid to other grammatical mechanisms and constructions Flemish signers (may) use to indicate this relationship, including: verb agreement; 'verb constructions' (a.k.a. classifier predicates, verbs of motion and location, polymorphemic verbs, polysynthetic constructions,…); localisation, the use of loci and pointing signs; role taking (a.k.a. role shifting or shifted attribution of expressive elements) and reference shifting; the use of both hands simultaneously and dominance reversals; the use of null arguments. Many of these mechanisms and constructions had hardly or never been studied for Flemish-1.This research project was funded by the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (October 1990-September 1994. MYRIAM VERMEERBERGENBelgian Sign Language but they had been described for a number of other sign languages. Where possible their description (of form and usage) is compared with existing descriptions in the international literature.The second major research question discussed in the dissertation is whether it is possible to identify a 'basic word order' -defined as: the word order of simple declarative, active clauses, with no complex noun phrases -for FlemishBelgian Sign Language and, if so, how this word order should be characterised. Based on the analysis of both elicited simple declarative sentences and a corpus of six hours of spontaneous language data, a tentative description of 'basic word order' for Flemish-Belgian Sign Language is proposed. This 'basic word order' can be characterised as a combination of two clauses, each representing a subject/ predicate structure. The first part of the sentence constitutes the framework for the second part of the sentence, which allows the combination to be seen as a topic/ comment structure. The frequently occurring repetitions of a constituent within a single clause or of a part of a ...