Case marking in sign languages?

[Deborah Chen Pichler]

Hello!  Sort of related to the interesting current discussion on gender in sign language,
does anyone know of any instances of case being expressed overtly in a sign language,
either manually on on the mouth?  In Croatian Sign Language (Hrvatski Znakovni Jezik, or
HZJ), for example, nouns seem to be signed the same regardless of case, but signers often
mouth case inflected forms of the corresponding spoken Croatian word.  I'm curious to
know the following:

1.  How widespread is this practice in areas where the surrounding spoken language has
heavy case inflections (e.g. Germany, Slavic countries, Japan)?
2.  Where mouthing of case- marked spoken forms is used, do signers consider case
distinctions linguistically relevant?
3. In addition to mouthin, do signers use different pronoun forms depending on case (e.g.
a change in the index handshape)?

Thanks,

Deborah Chen Pichler
Purdue University Sign Language Linguistics Lab
West Lafayette, IN 47907
debica2 at yahoo.com

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