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Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 24:1 (2021) ► pp.63–86

Negation and polar question–answer clauses in South African Sign Language

| Stellenbosch University
This paper contributes to the typological debate of whether sign languages should be divided into manual versus non-manual dominant languages, w.r.t. negation, a distinction that has recently been challenged (Johnston 2018) or argued to be too radical (Oomen & Pfau 2017), by providing a characterization of negation in South African Sign Language (SASL). It has also been observed in several sign languages that a construction which consists of a yes-no question followed by a negative fragment answer, both produced by the same speaker, can be used to negate a proposition. While this question-answer pair construction has received attention in the recent sign language literature, it is only mentioned in passing in the literature on negation. In this paper, I provide an analysis of these polar question-answer clauses as a grammaticalized negation strategy in SASL, following Caponigro and Davidson’s (2011) analysis of this construction in ASL.
Keywords: negation, sign language, syntax, non-manual marking, headshakes, question-answer pair, South African Sign Language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Negation in South African Sign Language
    • 2.2Question-answer clauses
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
  • 5.A brief analysis of polar question-answer clauses in SASL
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.19014.hud
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