Abstract
This paper investigates coordination in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). We offer an account for a typologically unusual coordination pattern found in this language. We show that the conjuncts of a coordinated structure in NGT may violate a constraint governing coordinated structures in spoken languages, which we refer to as the ‘Parallel Structure Constraint’. The violation consists in asymmetric fronting in the second conjunct of a coordinated structure. We argue that a violation of the Parallel Structure Constraint is acceptable in NGT in order to express a contrast across the conjuncts. Hence asymmetric reordering in the second conjunct is a strategy that allows signers to obtain the desired strength of marking when in situ marking is insufficient.
Highlights
In this paper, we investigate coordination in Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal – NGT)
We show that the conjuncts of a coordinated structure in NGT may violate a constraint governing coordinated structures in spoken languages, which we refer to as the ‘Parallel Structure Constraint’ (PSC, see, e.g., Lang 1987; Progovac 1998)
Our analysis of data extracted from the Corpus NGT reveals that coordination in NGT may exhibit violations of the well-established Parallel Structure Constraint, that is, we encountered a number of examples in which the word order differs across the conjuncts
Summary
We investigate coordination in Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal – NGT). We show that the conjuncts of a coordinated structure in NGT may violate a constraint governing coordinated structures in spoken languages, which we refer to as the ‘Parallel Structure Constraint’ (PSC, see, e.g., Lang 1987; Progovac 1998). According to this constraint, the conjuncts of a coordination agree with respect to their word order, that is, word order variation across conjuncts leads to marked results. The second conjunct provides a contrastively focused constituent (cf Repp 2016; Zimmermann 2008), which is marked by syntactic movement to a focus position in the left periphery. Asymmetric focus movement is a last resort strategy to express the focal contrast across the conjuncts (cf. Hartmann 2000), at the cost of a PSC violation
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