Kinship terminology in SLs

[Lou de B]

Erin Wilkinson at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque is doing her
dissertation on kinship terms in SLs right now.
Good luck,
Louise


On 3/12/08 8:04 AM, "emaragreen at berkeley.edu" <emaragreen at berkeley.edu>
wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> SLLING-L mailing list
> SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
> http://majordomo.valenciacc.edu/mailman/listinfo/slling-l
> 
> 


_______________________________________________
SLLING-L mailing list
SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
http://majordomo.valenciacc.edu/mailman/listinfo/slling-l