Grammatical Gender in BSL

[Ulrike Zeshan]

The closest thing to gender marking that I have seen in sign languages is
the sub-system in the Japanese Sign Language family where an upright thumb
stands for male persons and an upright little finger stands for female
persons. It only works for humans though, so it is not exactly like the
French example below. For Japanese Sign Language, this gender marking is
part of the classifier system. In Taiwanese Sign Language, it is part of the
auxiliary system.
Ulrike



am 23.06.2002 21:15 Uhr schrieb Adam Schembri, Deaf Studies unter
Adam.Schembri at BRISTOL.AC.UK:

> I'm not aware of any evidence for grammatical gender in BSL (if by
> the term grammatical gender, you are referring to the type of
> grammatical phenomena found in French where nouns are classed into
> 'masculine' and 'feminine' categories and determiners and adjectives
> show agreement, as in 'le mur vert' for 'the green wall' versus 'la
> table verte' for 'the green table').
>