Case marking in sign languages?

[Nobukatsu Minoura]

on 6/25/02 3:57 AM, Deborah Chen Pichler at debica2 at yahoo.com wrote:
> 1.  How widespread is this practice in areas where the surrounding spoken
> language has
> heavy case inflections (e.g. Germany, Slavic countries, Japan)?

In spoken Japanese, noun cases are expressed NOT by noun endings (unlike
Slavic languages) but by separate particles.  Therefore we have caseless
noun forms.  When mouthing of spoken Japanese is used in connection with
Japanese Sign Language (JSL), these caseless noun forms are used and the
case particles hardly accompany them.  (On the other hand in signed
Japanese, the case particles are usually pronounced and/or mouthed.)

(By the way, the topic marking particle "wa" can be sometimes mouthed in
addition to other NMS in JSL.  This can be regarded as contamination from
signed Japanese or a part of JSL depending on your definition of JSL.)

> 3. In addition to mouthin, do signers use different pronoun forms depending on
> case (e.g.
> a change in the index handshape)?

JSL does not have even the separate possessive pronouns unlike ASL or DGS.
Therefore there is no case differences for the pronouns.

It seems to me that the cases of nouns are not encoded on the nouns or on
the pronouns in JSL but instead on the verbs (cf. agreement verbs, spatial
verbs) or on the auxiliaries adjacent to the verbs with the same handshape
as the pronouns (1-handshape).  This case resembles the situation in
predominantly head-marking (a la Johanna Nichols) spoken languages like
Athabaskan.

Nobukatsu Minoura
Linguistics
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies