Doctoral Dissertation Research: Information Structure of the Clause-final Position in an Understudied Sign Language

This project investigates the implicit rules that account for the patterns found in sentence structures of sign languages. Like spoken languages, sign languages have a rule-governed linguistic system, but these rules may be different because sign languages are transmitted through visual-gestural signals rather than oral-audio signals. Linguistic research on sign languages plays an important role in justifying their status as natural languages, fighting against discrimination towards sign languages and deaf people, and advocating for using them in broader contexts in society. This project highlights one particular issue of sign language sentence structure. When a signer wants to make some information more prominent, this part will often show up at the end of the sentence - a tendency that is not often attested across spoken languages. This doctoral dissertation project addresses the reason behind this interesting linguistic pattern by examining constructions showing the pattern. By bringing in a comprehensive description and analysis of the constructions in question in an understudied language, the proposed project will contribute to theoretical research and typology of information structure in human languages. To understand the correlation between focus elements and the clause-final position in sign languages, this dissertation project will investigate wh-phrases in wh-questions, the Answer-clause in Question Answer Pairs, negative markers, and focused phrases modified or not by the focus-sensitive quantifier 'only'. The analysis will be based on three types of data collected from deaf native/near-native signers, including fieldwork data (tasks include elicited production, acceptability judgment, and translation tasks), naturalistic data, and judgment data collected from a small-scale experiment. The analysis will focus on addressing the information-structure related properties of the target categories, including constituent order, prosodic marking, focus-related semantic-pragmatic properties, and the interaction between word order alternation and prosodic focus marking. The collected data will also be used to evaluate existing theories of information structure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.