Kinship terminology in SLs

[Pfau, R.]

Hi Mara (and others),

Victoria Nyst discusses kinship terms in Adamorobe Sign Language (Ghana) in her 2007 dissertation; chapter 3 (section 3.3).
The dissertation is available online at:

http://www.lotpublications.nl/index3.html

Scroll down to "2007", then search for Victoria's name (it's just above "2006"). Next to it, you can click on "contents".

Probably you already found:
Woodward, J.C. (1978), All in the family: Kinship lexicalization across sign languages. Sign Language Studies 19, 121-138.

Good luck & best regards,

Roland 


**********************************
Dr. Roland Pfau
Assistant Professor
Dept. of General Linguistics
University of Amsterdam 
Spuistraat 210 (room 353)
1012 VT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

tel. 0031-(0)20-5253022
r.pfau at uva.nl
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/r.pfau/
**********************************


-----Original Message-----
From: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu [mailto:slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu] On Behalf Of emaragreen at berkeley.edu
Sent: dinsdag 2 december 2008 22:04
To: slling-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
Subject: [SLLING-L] Kinship terminology in SLs


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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