Review of Van der Kooij (2002): Phonological Categories in Sign Language of the Netherlands. The Role of Phonetic Implementation and Iconicity

Demey, Eline

doi:10.1075/sll.6.2.11dem

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…A reviewer speculates that the sideward movement observed in the reduplication of latnouns might not be motivated by phonological constraints alone. Phonological features of signs sometimes have a semantic motivation (Stokoe 1991;van der Kooij 2002;Sandler 2018), that is, the sublexical building blocks may reflect semantic properties of the referent in iconic signs (e.g., in bicycle in Figure 3a, the handshape and movement reflect the pedals of a bike). If the latnoun child was reduplicated without sideward movement, the resulting form could potentially be misinterpreted as a repeated action (i.e., an iconic representation of bouncing a ball).…”

Section: Nounmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nominal plurals in Sign Language of the Netherlands: Accounting for allomorphy and variation

Boven

Hamann

Pfau

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In both signed and spoken languages, reduplication is a common process in the formation of morphologically complex structures, expressing, e.g., plurality and certain aspectual meanings. A framework in which spoken language reduplication has been formalized frequently is Optimality Theory (OT). While an important attribute of OT-constraints is their universality, to date, the question to what extent such constraints are modality-independent, and thus work for sign language reduplication as well, remains largely unanswered. In the present study, we offer the first OT-formalization of plural reduplication in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). The NGT-data reveal that this language features different plural allomorphs, the choice of which depends on phonological properties of the base noun. However, we also identify variation, e.g., all noun types allow for zero marking.In our formalization, we aim to introduce constraints that are maximally modality-independent, using constraint types that have previously been proposed for spoken language reduplication. Our formalization is the first to take into account base-reduplicant faithfulness for a sign language, and also the first to account for variation in sign language data by employing stochastic OT, whereby some noise is added to the ranking value of each constraint at evaluation time. Evaluating the modality-(in)dependence of our proposed account suggests that the types of constraints we employ as well as the evaluation in the spirit of stochastic OT are not specific to a modality, while the featural implementation is inevitably modality-dependent.

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Section: Nounmentioning

confidence: 99%