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The phonology of focus in Sign Language of the Netherlands1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2013
Abstract
Signed languages are similar to spoken languages in the overall organisation of their grammars, displaying a prosodic level of organisation that is not isomorphic to the syntactic organisation. Their rich inventory of manual and non-manual features allows for a prolific range of functions if used prosodically. New data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT, Nederlandse Gebarentaal) are discussed to demonstrate that focused constituents are not marked by a single prosodic feature, but rather by multiple properties that can also have other functions in the prosodic phonology of the language. These findings are integrated in an overall model of sign language prosody that emphasises the distinction between phonetic appearance and phonological representation and that allows for the interaction of linguistic and paralinguistic cues in visual communication.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013
Footnotes
The authors would like to acknowledge all the signers who participated in our data elicitation procedure, and in particular Johan Ros, Wim Emmerik, and Gerdinand Wagenaar for their intuitions on Sign Language of the Netherlands. Thanks to Wendy Sandler for initial discussions and elicitation materials used at the start of this study, to Carlos Gussenhoven for valuable advice and feedback, and to three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their many helpful comments. This research was made possible by grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grants 360-70-140 and 276-70-012) and the European Research Council (ERC Starting Researcher Grant 210373 awarded to Onno Crasborn). The authors have contributed equally to the present paper and are listed in alphabetical order.
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