Morphological reduplication in Sign Language of the Netherlands

In this talk I will present some of the results of my PhD project, which I carried out the past 4+ years at the ACLC. The project provides a description of morphological reduplication in Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT), focusing on three of its functions, i.e., nominal pluralization, aspect marking, and reciprocal marking. Analysis of naturalistic corpus data is combined with data elicitation. The findings reveal that, for all three functions, different types of reduplication alternate with zero marking, and the choice between strategies is influenced by different factors, such as the phonological make-up of the base sign, the meaning that is expressed, and the morphosyntactic verb type.

In the talk I will highlight the different reduplication types identified for NGT, and I will address how the choice between them is made. Moreover, I will briefly compare the results to what previous research has described for other signed and spoken languages. Indeed, while there are cross-modal patterns, the process also comes with a modality-specific flavor. This, however, should not be taken to imply that reduplication looks exactly the same across sign languages.

NGT-English interpreters will be present.

About the ACLC seminar series

The ACLC seminar series is a lecture series organized by the ACLC, the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication.