Article published in:
Impersonal human reference in Sign LanguagesEdited by Gemma Barberà and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr
[Sign Language & Linguistics 21:2] 2018
► pp. 204–231
Impersonal reference in Russian Sign Language (RSL)
Vadim Kimmelman | University of Amsterdam
This paper contains the first description of impersonal reference in Russian Sign Language (RSL). Impersonal
reference has been investigated using a variety of elicitation techniques. It has been found that RSL uses a variety of
strategies, namely pro-drop, an indefinite pronoun someone, a plural pronoun ix
pl, and probably a
second-person pronoun ix
2 in impersonal contexts. The impersonal strategies in RSL follow the general
typological tendencies previously identified for spoken languages (Gast & Van der Auwera
2013), and do not show obvious modality effects (such as described by Barberà &
Quer 2013). Some impersonal strategies show evidence of influence of spoken/written Russian in the form of borrowing
and/or code-switching.
Keywords: impersonal reference, Russian Sign Language, pro-drop
Published online: 22 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00018.kim
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00018.kim
References
References
Barberà, Gemma
Barberà, Gemma & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr
Barberà, Gemma & Josep Quer
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker
Burkova, Svetlana I.
2015 Russian Sign Language: general information. Russian Sign Language Corpus. Novosibirsk, 2012–2015. Project leader: Svetlana Burkova. http://rsl.nstu.ru/site/signlang
Burkova, Svetalana I. & Elizaveta V. Filimonova
Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia
Caponigro, Ivano & Kathryn Davidson
Davidson, Kathryn & Deanne Gagne
Gast, Volker & Johan van der Auwera
Gries, Stefan Th
Haspelmath, Martin
2013 Indefinite pronouns. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/46, accessed on 2017-08-17).
Kimmelman, Vadim
2015 R-impersonals in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Presentation at
Workshop on sign languages and R-impersonal pronouns
, Paris, February 2015.
Liddell, Scott
Nyst, Victoria
Schütze, Carson T. & Jon Sprouse
Siewierska, Anna
Siewierska, Anna & Maria Papastathi
R Core Team
2016 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL:https://www.R-project.org/