ERIC Number: EJ1270256
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017
Pages: 33
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0302-1475
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Question-Answer Pairs in Sign Language of the Netherlands
Kimmelman, Vadim; Vink, Lianne
Sign Language Studies, v17 n4 p417-449 Sum 2017
Several sign languages of the world utilize a construction that consists of a question followed by an answer, both of which are produced by the same signer. For American Sign Language, this construction has been analyzed as a discourse-level rhetorical question construction (Hoza et al. 1997), as a single-sentence question-answer pair (Caponigro and Davidson 2011), and as "wh"-clefts (Wilbur 1996). In this article, we analyze this construction in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) based on corpus data. We demonstrate that its properties show a great deal of variation, making it impossible to apply any of the previous accounts to the NGT data. In particular, we found both discourse-level combinations of questions and answers, and single sentence structures resembling "wh"-clefts. We argue that this variation is a reflex of grammaticalization of discourse-level rhetorical strategy into a single-sentence construction functionally similar to "wh"-clefts.
Descriptors: Sign Language, Language Variation, Sentence Structure, Computational Linguistics, Grammar, Questioning Techniques, Foreign Countries, Language Usage
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Information Analyses; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
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Language: English
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Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Netherlands
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