Plural formation in German Sign Language: Constraints and strategies
Temas
Detalles
Pluralization of nouns is an intricate issue. On the one hand, languages make use of different plural marking strategies. On the other hand, even within one language, different strategies and/or different morphological markers may find use, depending on lexical, phonological, or morphological properties of the base noun. In this paper, we shall have a closer look at the pluralization of nouns in German Sign Language (DGS). It will be shown that DGS patterns with spoken languages in that (a) different plural marking strategies are available, (b) within one strategy (reduplication) there are different types of realization, and (c) the choice of strategy and the choice of type crucially depend on phonological properties of the base noun, in particular, on the noun’s location and movement features. The description of basic plural patterns will be supplemented by an investigation of how and where the plural feature is realized within a particular phrasal domain. Finally, we will propose an optimality-theoretic analysis that accounts for the pluralization patterns in DGS.
En: Helen Leuninger & Daniela Happ (eds.), Gebärdensprachen: Struktur, Erwerb, Verwendung (Linguistische Berichte Special Issue 15), pp. 111-144.