Word order asymmetries in NGT coordination: The impact of Information Structure

Abstract

Research on spoken languages shows that the structure of coordination is typically determined by the parallel architecture of the conjuncts involved, a constraint that we refer to as the "Parallel Structure Constraint" (PSC). Apart from syntactic parallelism, the PSC requires that the conjuncts exhibit the same information structure (IS). We address the structure of coordination and the working of the PSC in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), using corpus data. Data extracted from the Corpus NGT reveal that the PSC may be violated in this language in that the order of predicate and argument may vary across conjuncts. We claim that this asymmetry results from IS-related syntactic movement, in particular, fronting of a contrastively focused constituent in the second conjunct. It appears that in NGT, movement is at times preferred over prosodic marking in situ, as it is a more salient foregrounding strategy in such complex (bi-clausal) constructions.

Coordination and gapping in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

“…Another indirect contribution comes from Kimmelman ( 2017) who looks at simultaneous events expressed via weak hand holds in RSL and uses a CoP structure to coordinate simultaneous TPs in a multidominant structure (see more in 2.3.1.1). In addition, Legeland et al (2018) work on coordination in NGT, and examine parallelism in conjunction and disjunction (see also 1.1.4 for spoken languages).…”

“…Word order can then be considered highly determined by discourseconfigurational principles. I will not enter this discussion for LSC, therefore I address the reader to Legeland et al (2018).…”

“…Through coordination it is also possible to realize ellipsis, which comes in different types, among which one is gapping. Unlike coordination, which already received some attention in SLs (HKSL by Tang and Lau (2012), ASL by Davidson (2011), FinSL by Jantunen (2015) and NGT by Legeland et al (2018)), gapping is SLs is still an understudied phenomenon. Several authors presented data on ellipsis and outlined directions for a potential analysis, but no formal syntactic analysis has been proposed so far.…”

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

“…Across different sign languages topics are usually placed in a more left-peripheral position in the clause and are frequently accompanied by a specific non-manual marking as for instance brow raise and/or are separated from the rest of the clause by a short prosodic break as in (47) (Sze 2011). In such constructions, the non-manual marking brow raise is usually analyzed as fulfilling semantic/pragmatic functions such as signaling old/given or new information, but see Wilbur & Patschke (1999) Legeland, Hartmann & Pfau (2018) showed that information structure can account for word order variation found in coordinated structures. They observed that word order varies in both conjuncts as in (48) (Legeland, Hartmann & Pfau 2018: 61).…”

“…Hence, it seems that the constructions shown in (164)a) and (164)c) might be influenced by the structure of spoken German. Another point that deserves further investigation is whether DGS allows for word order asymmetries in coordinated structures as observed in NGT (Legeland, Hartmann & Pfau 2018). In NGT, word order might differ between both conjuncts and the authors ascribe it to information structural reasons (see section 3.1.2.2).…”