big, small, tall, short

[Des Power]

An interesting issue :-) Yes Victoria, Auslan has both "referent-dependent
size signs" (in passing, would these be a kind of classifier?) and "fixed"
ones (BIG, LITTLE, THIN, FAT, etc.). I therefore presume that BSL does too.
It would be interesting to do an analysis of which signs have fixed and
referent-dependent versions and which are only referent-dependent  and see
if it was systematic in any way (Adam, Trevor??)

Des
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> Hello everybody,
>
> I am describing a Ghanaian SL, called Adamorobe SL, which appears to have
> fixed, standard signs for BIG, SMALL, TALL and SHORT. That is, the form of
> these signs do not dependent on the kind of object they refer to. E.g 'a big
> cow' & 'a big bee' are signed:
> 'COW BIG' and 'BEE BIG', where the sign for BIG is the same in both
> sentences.
>
> In NGT (SL of the Netherlands), the signs for 'big', 'small', 'tall' and
> 'short' change according  to their referent. No fixed signs for these
> concepts seems to exist in NGT.
>
> I'm curious to find out how this works for other SLs. So, my question: does
> 'your' SL have, apart from referent-dependent size signs, a set of fixed
> signs expressing size?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Victoria Nyst
>
>
> *********************************************
> Drs. V.A.S. Nyst
> Universiteit van Amsterdam
> Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication
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> 1012 VT Amsterdam
> The Netherlands
> ++31 20 525 3107
>
>
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