Weak hand holds in two sign languages and two genres
Anna Sáfár | Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
Vadim Kimmelman | University of Amsterdam
In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of weak hand holds based on corpus data. We include both a cross-linguistic analysis of these holds in narrative data from Russian Sign Language (RSL) and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), and a language-internal, cross-genre analysis comparing NGT narrative and conversational data. We classified the functions of all holds found in two corpora of RSL and NGT, and analyzed their formal characteristics. We found that holds in RSL and NGT have similar functions. However, holds are significantly more frequent in RSL than in NGT. In addition, we found that the distribution of holds across different functions varies between different genres in NGT. The similarities between RSL and NGT in the domain of holds may be attributed to modality effects. The differences in frequency of holds ask for a language-specific explanation, and we discuss several possible scenarios.
Keywords: corpus data, cross-linguistic comparison, weak hand holds, Sign Language of the Netherlands, Russian Sign Language, cross-genre comparison
Published online: 04 February 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.18.2.02saf
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.18.2.02saf
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Papadatou-Pastou, Marietta & Anna Sáfár
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 december 2020. 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.