The impact of verb type on word order in German Sign Language
von Sina Proske
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2021-12-17
Erschienen:2022-08-11
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Markus Steinbach
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Markus Steinbach
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Annika Herrmann
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Marco Coniglio
Dateien
Name:Proske_Impact of verb type on word order in DGS.pdf
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Zusammenfassung
Englisch
Word order is one of the best studied and most discussed issues in spoken and sign language linguistics. Therefore, it is stunning that there is yet no broader empirical investigation of word order phenomena in German Sign Language (DGS). Hence, this dissertation aims to fill parts of this gap and presents the first thorough empirical study of basic word order and word order variation in DGS by using a newly version of a Sentence Reproduction Task (SRT). In this study, 22 native and near-native DGS signers saw recorded DGS conversations containing manipulated sentences (according to verb position and verb type) which had to be memorized and repeated. The aim was to test the influence of verb type on the structure of basic, unmarked, declarative clauses in DGS. Research in several typological unrelated sign languages (Johnston et al. 2007; Kimmelman 2012; Milković, Bradarić-Jončić & Wilbur 2006; Pavlič 2016a) has shown that among morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors, verb type is one of the aspects that might influence clause structure and which has not yet been tested for DGS. In sign languages, verbs are differentiated whether they spatially exploit the signing space or not. On the one hand, agreement and spatial verbs change their movement and direction in space based on properties of the verbal arguments; on the other hand, plain verbs cannot undergo such changes. It is hypothesized that agreement and spatial verbs favor verb-final clause structures (OV) in DGS, whereas plain verbs, however, tend to be used in clauses with objects following the verb (VO). It is further assumed that agreement marking and word order interact in DGS (Oomen 2020). Accordingly, next to different frameworks and approaches of agreement and word order theory in spoken and sign languages, this dissertation discusses recent theoretical accounts of DGS which offer an agreement analysis supposing that all verb types take part in the agreement process (Oomen 2020; Oomen & Kimmelman 2019; Pfau, Salzmann & Steinbach 2018) or argue for differential object marking and object shift in DGS (Börstell 2019; Bross 2020a; Bross 2020b). The results of the presented SRT study show that (S)OV is the most frequent word order (64.7%) followed by (S)VO (12.6%), SV (12.2%) and other orders (10.5%) supporting claims that DGS is a verb-final language. They further confirm that clause structure is affected by verb type since agreement verbs, spatial verbs and verbs involving handling classifier handshapes occur with OV order, whereas (body-anchored) plain verbs appear with VO order. Moreover, clause structure and agreement marking interact since modified agreement verbs predominantly occur with OV structure, while VO structure is used when agreement modification is missing. Clauses that involve the agreement marker PAM (Rathmann 2003) predominantly show SOV order. PAM is mainly found with modified agreement verbs and is placed preverbally before an animate object. In addition, argument omission frequently occurs but is less observed with VO order. The results presented in this dissertation are thus in accordance with recent presented claims made by Oomen (2020) such as to distinguish separately between plain verbs articulated on or near the body (body-anchored plain verbs) and verbs articulated in the neutral signing space (neutral plain verbs) as well as recent arguments that PAM is a differential object marker in DGS (Bross 2020b).
Keywords: German Sign Language; DGS; Word order; Verb type