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Article published In:
Special Issue in Memory of Irit Meir
Edited by Diane Lillo-Martin, Wendy Sandler, Marie Coppola and Rose Stamp
[Sign Language & Linguistics 23:1/2] 2020
► pp. 142–170

From a demonstrative to a relative clause marker

Grammaticalization of pointing signs in Israeli Sign Language

| University of Haifa

Demonstratives provide an important link between gesture, discourse and grammar due to their communicative function to coordinate the interlocutor’s focus of attention. This underlies their frequent cross-linguistic development into a wide range of function words and morphemes (Diessel 1999). The present study provides evidence for a link between gesture and grammar by tracking diachronic development of a relative clause marker in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) restrictive relative clauses, which starts as a gestural locative pointing sign, and grammaticalizes into a relative pronoun connecting relative and main clauses and agreeing with referent loci, and then into an invariant relativizer. Diachronic changes are inferred from the data collected from three generations of signers. The results reveal that the behavior of demonstratives in the data varied with the signers’ ages according to four diagnostic criteria of grammaticalization (e.g., Hopper & Traugott 2003): increased systematicity, distributional and morphological changes, and phonetic reduction.

Keywords: demonstratives, pointing, grammaticalization, Israeli Sign Language, relative clauses, non-manuals
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Demonstratives in language and communication
    • 2.1Defining properties of demonstratives
    • 2.2Demonstratives and non-verbal communication
    • 2.3Demonstratives, the emergence of grammar and grammaticalization
  • 3.Grammaticalization of demonstratives in sign languages
    • 3.1Grammatical functions of pointing in sign languages
    • 3.2The role of non-manual signals and pointing in sign language relative clauses
    • 3.3Diachronic development of pointing in sign languages
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1The community and participants
    • 4.2Elicitation task
    • 4.3Coding and analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Frequency
    • 5.2Distribution
    • 5.3Changes in spatial modification
    • 5.4Cues of phonetic reduction
  • 6.Discussion: Grammaticalization stages of the manual marker of ISL subject-subject restrictive relative clauses
    • 6.1Stage 1 – locative demonstratives
    • 6.2Stage 2 – adnominal demonstratives
    • 6.3Stage 3 – demonstratives as relative pronouns
    • 6.4Stage 4 – demonstratives as relativizers
  • 7.Conclusions: contribution and limitations of the study
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00047.dac
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