Expression of Aboutness Subject Topic Constructions in Turkish Sign Language (TİD) Narratives

Abstract

In the visual-spatial modality, signers indicate old, new, or contrastive information using certain syntactic, prosodic, and morphological strategies. Even though information structure has been described extensively for many sign languages, the flow of information in the narrative discourse remains unexplored in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). This study aims to describe aboutness subject topic constructions in TİD narratives. We examined data from six adult native signers of TİD and found that TİD signers mainly used nominals for reintroduced aboutness subject topics. The optional and rare non-manual markers observed on reintroduced topics mainly included squint, brow raise, and backward head tilt. Maintained aboutness subject topics, which have higher referential accessibility, were often omitted and tracked with zero anaphora. Finally, we found that constructed action is more frequently present on the predicates of clauses with a maintained aboutness subject topic than with a reintroduced aboutness subject topic. Overall, these results indicate that the use of constructed action and nominals in aboutness subject topics correlates with referential accessibility in TİD. While the former has been observed more in maintained contexts, the latter has been observed mainly in reintroduced contexts. In addition to the syntactic and prosodic cues that may distinguish old information from new or contrastive information in narratives, we suggest that pragmatic cues such as referential accessibility may help account for the manual and non-manual articulation strategies for information structure in TİD narratives.