Abstract
Sign language typology is a young research field with two related goals. First, sign languages (SLs) are compared to spoken languages with respect to certain grammatical features to scrutinize which typological distinctions are valid across modalities and to determine whether theoretical accounts that are based on spoken language data can be applied to SLs. Second, SLs are compared to each other to further investigate whether they differ along similar lines as spoken languages do. In this project, both types of typological comparison are applied to the area of argument structure (AS). Verbs in all natural languages must be specified for how many participants they require (subject, (in)direct object); compare e.g. Peter laughed with the ungrammatical Peter visited. Interestingly, a given verb may be variable with respect to its AS; compare Peter broke the window to The window broke. In addition, there are syntactic and morphological means to change AS, e.g. in a passive construction (e.g. He was visited). We will refer to the first type of behavior as AS-alternation, and to the latter as AS-change. While AS, AS-alternations, and AS-changes are well studied for spoken languages, very little is known about what verb classes exist in SLs and whether SLs employ systematic AS-changing strategies. This project sets out to fill this gap by providing the first cross-linguistic study on AS in SLs. In three sub-projects, we will study AS in three unrelated SLs, by means of corpus analysis and data elicitation, to (i) provide a cross-modal and intra-modal typological comparison and (ii) to evaluate the applicability of existing theoretical accounts to SLs.