Vol. 24:1 (2021) ► pp.63–86
Negation and polar question–answer clauses in South African Sign Language
This paper contributes to the typological debate of whether sign languages should be divided into manual versus non-manual dominant languages, w.r.t. negation, a distinction that has recently been challenged (Johnston 2018) or argued to be too radical (Oomen & Pfau 2017), by providing a characterization of negation in South African Sign Language (SASL). It has also been observed in several sign languages that a construction which consists of a yes-no question followed by a negative fragment answer, both produced by the same speaker, can be used to negate a proposition. While this question-answer pair construction has received attention in the recent sign language literature, it is only mentioned in passing in the literature on negation. In this paper, I provide an analysis of these polar question-answer clauses as a grammaticalized negation strategy in SASL, following Caponigro and Davidson’s (2011) analysis of this construction in ASL.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1Negation in South African Sign Language
- 2.2Question-answer clauses
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Results
- 5.A brief analysis of polar question-answer clauses in SASL
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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References
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.19014.hud