Word order in Russian Sign Language: an extended report
Temas
Detalles
In this paper the results of an investigation of word order in Russian Sign Language (RSL) are presented. A small corpus (16 minutes) of narratives based on comic strips by 9 native signers was analyzed and a picture-description experiment was conducted with 6 native signers. The data reveal that the most frequent word order in RSL is SVO for plain and agreeing verbs and SOV for classifier predicates. Some factors can influence the word order, namely aspect marking on the veb (favours OV), semantic reversibility of the situation and "heaviness" of the object. One of the findings of the investigation is that locative situations are described differently in the narratives and in the experimental settings: in the letter but not in the former case the OSV order is quite common. This may result from two different strategies of creating locative sentences.