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Linguistic research on typologically different sign languages (SLs) over the past fifty years has demonstrated vividly that SL grammars incorporate grammatical systems of pronominal reference, quantification, agreement, subordination, mood, aspect, and rules of sign order that are comparable to that found in spoken languages, including their historical development, acquisition, processing and variation. Taking this general conclusion to be well-established, a prominent trend of research focuses on those aspects of SL grammar that nevertheless appear to make SLs different from spoken languages. Such apparently SL-specific grammatical properties pose potentially fruitful challenges to the study of Universal Grammar (UG), and they offer illuminating perspectives on the ways sign languages are shaped by the gestural-visual nature of their modality (including the use of space, non-manuals, simultaneity, the interaction with gesture, etc).
This workshop provides a forum for the discussion of theoretical, and theoretically oriented typological and psycholinguistic aspects of SL syntax whose analysis contributes to a better understanding of UG, as well as the ways in which UG interacts with the properties of the gestural-visual modality to yield apparently SL-specific linguistic structures and phenomena.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the grammatical systems of:
syntactic categories
• agreement (incl. verbal agreement, classifier constructions, role shift)
• anaphor binding
• coordination and subordination
• syntactic displacement
• sentence types
• information structure
• ellipsis
abstract submission
The same abstract may not be submitted to both the main colloquium and a workshop.
No abstract may be longer than 2 pages (A4 or letter size) with 1in margins, set single spaced in a 12pt font. Abstracts must be anonymous, self references should be avoided. Please make sure that there is no indication of the authors’ identity in the file submitted. (Files uploaded to Easychair are renamed by the system, but a PDF file may contain hidden information about its author or creator.)
You can submit an abstract to the workshop via Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=glow41sign
The deadline for submitting abstracts is 15 November.
