Kinship terminology in SLs

[emaragreen at berkeley.edu]

Hello, all,

This is my first post so please accept my apologies if it is in any way
unclear!  By way of introduction, let me briefly say that I am a PhD
student in linguistic anthropology at UC Berkeley working in Nepal with
both Nepali Sign Language signers and home signers.

For a linguistics course I am currently taking, I am looking at kinship
terminology in Nepali Sign Language and thinking about its relationships
(semantically and morphologically) to other languages, including (spoken)
Nepali and signed languages with which Nepali signers have had substantial
contact.  My professor suggested that it would be of great help to gather
some cross-linguistic data on kinship terms/structure in other sign
languages, and I've had no luck either with articles or on-line SL
dictionaries (except for BSL and a few KSL signs).

Basically, in NSL, the distinctions made in kinship terminology (ie which
relationships are named) exactly parallel those made in spoken  Nepali
(the one article I found, on Argentinean Sign Language, indicated that
this isn't the case in Argentina, in relation to Spanish).  While Nepali
always distinguishes between male and female relatives, sometimes using
gender suffixes and sometimes using distinct lexical items, NSL
distinguishes between male and female by beginning all kinship terms (with
two exceptions) with the sign for female or the sign for male.  For
example, mother might be analyzed as "female + parent" and father as "male
+ parent," except that the morpheme glossed here as "parent" can never
stand alone.

If anyone has the time to point me towards articles or online
dictionaries, or to provide me with a brief description of these matters
in a sign language they know well, including a) the relationship between
the structure of kinship terminology in the SL and in the
relevant/dominant spoken language(s) and b) the morphological/compounding
structure used (if any) in the individual terms that would be fantastic.

Thank you and I look forward to being a part of this listserv!
Mara

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