Czech Sign Language compounds: preliminary description and typology
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description |
Compounding is among the core processes in sign language (SL) word-formation (Quer et al. 2017, Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). While compound is a relatively straightforward notion in spoken languages, it is more complicated in SLs due to an ongoing discussion about definitions of morphemes, stems and affixes (Zwitserlood 2012), as well as the modality-specific possibility of simultaneous articulation by two hands. SL compounds are understood as morphologically complex, consisting of two (or more) independent lexemes that may introduce a new meaning (Quer et al. 2017). The distinction from set phrases is the phonological reduction/assimilation: shortening or loss of stress, deletion of the movement repetitions, assimilation of movement or place (Zeshan 2004). Among several typological classifications proposed (Klima and Bellugi 1979, Brennan 1990, Vercellotti and Mortensen 2012), the most thorough is Santoro (2018) on French and Italian SL. Santoro categorizes SL compounds wrt: (i) syntax: subordinate (complement and attributive) vs coordinate (coordinated and hypernym); (ii) semantics: endocentric vs exocentric; (iii) prosody: sequential vs simultaneous; (iv) lexicon: native (core signs, classifiers, size and shape specifiers) vs non-native (fingerspelled or name signs, loans) vs mixed. The current work aims to apply Santoro´s typology to (deeply understudied) Czech Sign Language (ČZJ). Only Mladová (2009) comments on ČZJ compounds, but her typology is insufficient and needs to be elaborated further. We will utilize the online sign language dictionary Dictio, the largest database of ČZJ signs to date, and categorize all the compounds (and set phrases for their formal closeness) into their respective types. Thus, the contribution of this work is threefold: (i) empirical: an extensive systematic typology of ČZJ compounds; (ii) theoretical: an attempt to answer questions raised by Santoro about the cross-linguistic nature of the combinatorial gaps in compound production; (iii) applied: classification and possible correction of compounds and set phrases in Dictio. |
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