Search

In article, "reported speech as a dedicated syntactic domain which includes typological arguments and observations" by the Stef Spronck and the Tatiana Nikitina. Topics discussed include information on the core properties of reported speech constructions from a typological point of view; discussions on the limiting amount of descriptive work in sign languages when compared to spoken languages; and the evidence provided by sign languages in the domain of linguistic reports.

The article discusses the constructed action or action role shift occurrences in sign languages and explores the indexical signs in pronoun.

Natural languages come in two different modalities - the aural-auditory modality of spoken languages and the visual-gestural modality of sign languages. The impact of modality on the grammatical system has been discussed at great length in the last 20 years. By contrast, the impact of modality on semantics in general and on ambiguities in particular has not yet been addressed in detail. In this paper, we deal with different types of ambiguities in sign languages. We discuss typical lexical and structural ambiguities as well as modality-specific aspects such as ambiguities in the use of the signing space and non-manual markers. In addition, we address the questions how sign languages avoid ambiguities and to what extent certain kinds of ambiguities and non-ambiguities depend on the visual-manual modality of sign languages. Since gestures use the same articulatory channel that is also active in the production of signs, we also discuss ambiguities between gestures on the one hand and grammaticalized gestures and signs on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses sign language (SL) agreement, which continues to dominate the Sign Linguistics debate regarding the analysis of the building blocks of languages in the gestural-visual modality. It addresses a number of points that could be formulated and lead to a partially different conclusion from theirs in relation to the role of gesture in SL grammar. It suggests the ideas including the notion that there is no point in agreement and that there is one kind of agreement. It concludes that SLs are rooted in and exploit the visual-gestural modality that differentiate them from spoken languages.

An analysis of the interpretation of indicative/subjunctive contrasts in embedded clauses is pursued here that, rather than attaching rigid meanings to each mood, views mood shifts as the overt marking of a change in the model for the evaluation of the proposition or property expressed by the embedded clause. From this perspective, mood morphology conveys information about model flow in discourse, which can be determined by a variety of factors ranging from lexical meaning of embedding predicates to different aspects of discourse interpretation and context change. The proposal identifies and analyzes the parameters that induce model shift in subordinated domains. This allows us to distinguish core cases of subjunctive selection from more peripheral ones, both within a language and crosslinguistically, and it also provides us with an explanation for several empirical problems that a rigid interpetation of mood leaves unresolved. The analysis offered concentrates on mood distribution in Catalan and Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]