Case marking in sign languages?

[Deborah Chen Pichler]

Hello!
I was looking through some of my old emails and saw that I did not reply to your helpful
emaul of 6/25/02! How embarrassing! I'm so sorry for the long delay. Thank you for your
comments on Japanese SL- it was one of the languages that I was particularly curious
about in this matter.

With (belated) appreciation,
Deborah Chen Pichler
Gallaudet Department of Linguistics and Interpretation

--- Nobukatsu Minoura <nobum at GOL.COM> wrote:
> 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


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com