Detecting clauses and their dependencies in signed utterances: A syntactico-semantic approach

Abstract

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 syntacticosemantic 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 whand 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.

Are We DONE Yet? A corpus-based analysis of DONE as a sentence-boundary diagnostic in DGS

“…As she points out, however, prosodic and syntactic constituents are not necessarily isomorphic and in some cases, non-manuals may spread over the former rather than the latter. Loos (2018) reviews a number of syntactico-semantic diagnostics for clausehood in American Sign Language (ASL) and DGS and proposes among others a modified subject pronoun copy test to distinguish coordination from embedding and rightward wh-movement as a diagnostic for distinguishing finite from infinitival complement clauses.…”

The impact of verb type on word order in German Sign Language

“…25 Loos (2018) discusses several semantic and syntactic diagnostics for distinguishing coordinated and subordinated structures and evaluates their applicability to DGS. While a copy of subject pronoun can occur with embedded structures, it is ungrammatical in coordinated structures and can thus serve as a diagnostic to differentiate between coordinated and subordinated clauses.…”