When the Meaning of Same Is Not Restricted to Likeness: A Preliminary Study from the Perspective of Discourse Relational Devices in Two Sign Languages

Abstract

This paper presents a study of a discourse relational device, namely same, in French Belgian Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language. Three aspects of same are examined including its distribution across genres, its functional description and its position in discourse. Two comparable samples were extracted from the reference corpora of these two sign languages. An annotation protocol and a segmentation model designed for the study of discourse relational devices in the spoken modality were used with the necessary adaptations to the signed modality. The results show a different distribution of same across genres in each sign language and several possible positions. Although same is polyfunctional in the two datasets, the most frequent function in the French Belgian Sign Language dataset (i.e., addition) is not found in the Catalan Sign Language dataset. This finding indicates that equivalent discourse relational devices in the signed modality also have language-specific functions as their counterparts in the spoken modality do.