gender marking in pronouns

[Susan Lloyd McBurney]

Dear SL-ling members-

I am looking for information/data on gender marking in sign language
pronominal systems.  I am aware of the fact that some Asian sign languages
(Taiwan Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language) use handshape to mark
gender (male and female) in various morpho-syntactic contexts (agreement
verbs, kinship lexemes etc.).

Fischer (1996) reports that "gender marking can co-occur with pronominal
indices".  She provides the following example ( I should mention that the
copy I have is of poor quality, so the subscripts  here set off in
parentheses - are very hard to read, and thus may be incorrect):

(18)    MOTHER(a)  COOK  CAN  INDEX (a-I)
        'Mother can cook, she can'
        (INDEX (a-I) simultaneously indicates person and gender)

Unfortunately, there is limited discussion of this phenomenon in the
paper.

My questions for the list are the following:

1. Which signed languages have gender marking in their pronominal systems?
2. What is the precise form of gender marking in these pronouns?  Is the
gender handshape incorporated into the pronoun, or is it articulated on
the non-dominant hand, to which the pronoun index points?
3. Is gender marking in pronouns obligatory?  In other words, are ALL
pronouns (indexes) marked for gender in a discourse?  If not, in what
contexts does gender marking occur within the pronominal system?

I would very much appreciate hearing from anyone who might have relevant
information.  Also, if I have overlooked published materials that address
this issue, please let me know.

Please respond directly to me and I will post a summary to the list.

Thanks in advance,

Susan McBurney
_________________________________________________________________________
mcburney at u.washington.edu               Department of Linguistics
                                        Cognitive Neuropsychology Lab
                                        University of Washington
                                        Box 354340
                                        Seattle WA 98195