Author:

Keywords:

Flemish Sign Language, South African Deaf Community, constituent order in signed languages, sign linguistics

Abstract:

There are a number of indications for a high degree of similarity between grammars of different sign languages studied so far. These observations are almost exclusively based on the analysis of American, Western European and Australian sign languages. However, more recent research into Asian sign languages and African (village) sign languages seems to challenge this assumption. It is therefore very interesting to conduct cross-linguistic research of a Western European sign language such as Flemish Sign Language and an African sign language such as South African Sign Language, which is why it was decided to set up a project involving these two sign languages as well as the two Deaf communities using them. In our presentation we will first briefly introduce the project in general, before focusing on the cross-linguistic study of constituent ordering in the two sign languages involved. This particular study makes use of a picture elicitation task, and discusses three types of declarative sentences (locative, reversible, and non-reversible). For each sign language, four informants contributed to the data collection (i.e. a total of 8 informants). The analysis and comparison of the data show some striking similarities across all signers, e.g. the use of certain types of auxiliary verbs possibly to prevent the combination of one verb and two arguments in one clause. But there are also some important differences between VGT and SASL, mostly concerning constituent order.