Numeral Incorporation as Grammaticalization? A Corpus Study on German Sign Language (DGS)

Abstract

Numeral incorporation describes the merging of a numeral sign with a lexical sign to create a single sign with a compositional meaning, e.g., “three weeks.” As a phenomenon of simultaneous morphology, numeral incorporation is unique to sign languages. While researchers disagree on the exact morphological structure of the construction, it has, thus far, mainly been described as a synchronic, phonological phenomenon. Using the DGS corpus, a language resource on German Sign Language, we explore the possibility of numeral incorporation resulting from a language change process, specifically a grammaticalization process. Our dataset comprises tokens belonging to nine different signs that may occur in numeral incorporations. We find a cline of three constructions in the corpus, which shows a progression from free morpheme to cliticized morpheme to bound morpheme (affix). A comparison of the usage frequency of the three constructions in different age groups reveals that signers use more incorporations the younger they are. Following the apparent time approach, these observations are taken as indicators of diachronic language change. We describe to what extent the properties of numeral incorporation fit with the grammaticalization hypothesis and conclude that while the emergence of numeral incorporation is an instance of language change and shows some aspects seen in grammaticalization, the gradual change fails to exhibit some crucial aspects of grammaticalization and, thus, should not be regarded as an example thereof.