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
Edited by Gemma Barberà and Patricia Cabredo Hofherr
[Sign Language & Linguistics 21:2] 2018
► pp. 204–231
Special issue articles
Impersonal reference in Russian Sign Language (RSL)
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
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Impersonal reference in spoken and sign languages
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Impersonal strategies
- 4.1Pro-drop
- 4.2The indefinite pronoun
- 4.3 ix pl
- 4.4 ix 2
- 5.Discussion
- 5.1Impersonal strategies on the semantic map
- 5.2The role of modality
- 5.3Contact with Russian
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
Bank, Richard
2014 The ubiquity of mouthings in NGT. Nijmegen: Radboud University PhD dissertation.
Barberà, Gemma
2012a A unified account of specificity in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). In Rick Nouwen, Anna Chernilovskaya & Ana Aguilar-Guevara (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16. Volume 11. 43–55. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
2012b The meaning of space in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Reference, specificity and structure in signed discourse. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra PhD dissertation.
Barberà, Gemma & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr
2017 Backgrounded agents in Catalan Sign Language (LSC): passives, middles, or impersonals? Language 93(4). 767–798. 
Barberà, Gemma & Josep Quer
2013 Impersonal reference in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). In Laurence Meurant, Aurélie Sinte, Mieke van Herreweghe & Miriam Vermeerbergen (eds.), Sign language research, uses and practices: Crossing views on theoretical and applied sign language linguistics, 237–258. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker
2015 Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48.
Burkova, Svetlana I.
2012 Uslovnyje kosntruktsii russkogo zhestovogo jazyka [Conditional constructions in Russian Sign Language]. In Olga V. Fedorova (ed.), Russkij zhestovyj jazyk: pervaja lingvisticheskaja konferentsija: sbornik statej, 50–81. Moscow: Buki Vedi.
2015 Russian Sign Language: general information. Russian Sign Language Corpus. Novosibirsk, 2012–2015. Project leader: Svetlana Burkova. [URL]
Burkova, Svetalana I. & Elizaveta V. Filimonova
2014 Reduplikatsija v russkom zhestovom jazyke [Reduplication in Russian Sign Language]. Russkij yazyk v nauchnom osveshchenii 281. 202–258.
Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia
2006 ‘Arbitrary’ pro and the theory of pro-drop. In Peter Ackema, Patrick Brandt, Maaike Schoorlemmer & Fred Weerman (eds.), Agreement and arguments, 230–258. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caponigro, Ivano & Kathryn Davidson
2011 Ask, and tell as well: clausal question-answer pairs in ASL. Natural Language Semantics 19(4). 323–371.
Davidson, Kathryn & Deanne Gagne
2014 Vertical representation of quantifier domains. In Urtzi Etxeberria, Anamaria Fălăuș, Artiz Irurtzun & Bryan Leferman (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 18, 110–127. Bayonne and Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Gast, Volker & Johan van der Auwera
2013 Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages. In Dik Bakker & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), Languages across boundaries. Studies in memory of Anna Siewierska, 31–56. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Gries, Stefan Th
2013 Statistics for linguistics with R: a practical introduction (2nd revised edition). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
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 [URL], accessed on 2017-08-17).
Kimmelman, Vadim
2014 Information structure in Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam PhD dissertation.
2015 R-impersonals in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Presentation at
Workshop on sign languages and R-impersonal pronouns
, Paris, February 2015.
2017 Quantifiers in Russian Sign Language. In Edward L. Keenan & Denis Paperno (eds.), Handbook of quantifiers in natural languages, vol. 21, 803–855. Berlin: Springer.
Liddell, Scott
1990 Four functions of a locus: Re-examining the structure of space in ASL. In Ceil Lucas (ed.), Sign language research: theoretical issues, 176–198. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Nyst, Victoria
2007 A descriptive analysis of Adamorobe Sign Language (Ghana). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam PhD dissertation.
Schütze, Carson T. & Jon Sprouse
2014 Judgment data. In Robert J. Podesva & Devyani Sharma (eds.), Research methods in linguistics, 27–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Siewierska, Anna
2008 Impersonalization from a subject-centred vs. agent-centred perspective. Transactions of the Philological Society 1061. 1–23.
2011 Overlap and complementarity in reference impersonals: Man constructions vs. third person plural-impersonals in the languages of Europe. In Andrej Malchukov & Anna Siewierska (eds.), Impersonal constructions. A cross-linguistic perspective, 57–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Siewierska, Anna & Maria Papastathi
2011 Third person plurals in the languages of Europe: Typological and methodological issues. Linguistics 491. 575–610.
R Core Team
2016 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL:[URL]
Wilbur, Ronnie B.
1996 Evidence for the function and structure of wh-clefts in American Sign Language. In William Edmondson & Ronnie B. Wilbur (eds.), International review of sign linguistics, 209–256. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Burkova, Svetlana, Evgeniia Khristoforova & Vadim Kimmelman
2023. Chapter 4. Syntactic functions of nonmanuals in Russian Sign Language. In Advances in Sign Language Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 108], ► pp. 90 ff. 
Kimmelman, Vadim
2021. Acceptability Judgments in Sign Linguistics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax, ► pp. 561 ff.
2022. Argument Structure in Sign Languages. Annual Review of Linguistics 8:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Kimmelman, Vadim, Vanja de Lint, Connie de Vos, Marloes Oomen, Roland Pfau, Lianne Vink & Enoch O. Aboh
2019. Argument Structure of Classifier Predicates: Canonical and Non-canonical Mappings in Four Sign Languages. Open Linguistics 5:1 ► pp. 332 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.