Indo-Pakistani sign language grammar: a typological outline
Temas
Detalles
This article presents an outline of basic aspects of the grammar of Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL), the sign language used in deaf communities in parts of the Indian subcontinent, cast in a typological framework.
Following a typological profile that is intended to capture the essential character of IPSL grammatical organization by typological standards, the article proceeds to describe important domains of IPSL grammar. This includes word classes and their syntactic functions, the marking of basic syntactic relations, the pronominal paradigm, possessive constructions, and categories of number marking. Basic sentence types (negatives, interrogatives, subordinate clauses) are also covered, as well as some principles of discourse organization.
IPSL is quite different in many respects from the better-documented Western sign languages and is therefore very interesting from the point of view of typological variation across sign languages.