Deontic and epistemic necessity in Turkish sign language (TİD)
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Asli Özkul
Abstract
This study investigates two flavors of the necessity modal sign NECESSARY in TİD and investigates their semantic and syntactic properties and how these properties interact. First, the modal flavors of this modal sign were identified through the contexts they occur in, based on the analysis by Kratzer (1981, 1991). Epistemic and deontic flavors of modality were searched for in the data, which was collected by spontaneous and semistructured elicitation tasks. Then, questionnaires that involve felicity and grammaticality judgment tasks were carried out to explore the semantic and syntactic properties of these modal signs in more detail. A total of 29 TİD signers participated in the data collection. The results of this investigation show that (i) NECESSARY is a necessity modal sign which has both epistemic and deontic interpretations, (ii) NECESSARY has a restricted syntactic position in a clause, (iii) non-manual markers differentiate between the epistemic and deontic interpretations of NECESSARY, which indicates that non-manual markers in TİD have both syntactic and prosodic functions.
6 Acknowledgements
Firstly, I thank the researchers of TÜBİTAK TİD-BİL Project (no.111K314) for giving me the permission to use their data. Secondly, I thank the informants, Elvan Tamyürek-Özparlak (TÜBİTAK Project no. 114E263), Gül Köroğlu-Yiğit and Feride Korkmaz for their help in participating in the judgment tasks and the video recordings. I also thank Assoc. Prof. Dr. Meltem Kelepir for her guidance at the beginning of this study. Lastly, I thank two anonymous reviewers for their precious comments and questions. All the mistakes are my own.
List of abbreviations
- Non-Manual Markers: _____:
the scope of NMMs
- bl-f:
forward body lean
- cb:
chin back
- c-down:
mouth corners down
- f:
furrowed eyebrows
- frown:
frowned forehead
- g:
gesture
- h-f:
head moves forward
- h-l:
head moves left
- h-r:
head moves right
- hn(x2, x3, x4):
head nod (multiple)
- hs:
head shake
- ht-f:
forward head tilt
- ht-b:
backward head tilt
- ins:
insecure facial expression
- nw:
to wrinkle one’s nose
- r:
raised eyebrows
- sh:
short statement
- sl:
slow movement
- sq:
squinted eye
- w:
wide open eyes
- ^:
two signs merged (as in BE^POSSIBLE)
Sign Languages
- ASL:
American Sign Language
- BSL:
British Sign Language
- DGS:
German Sign Language
- ISL:
Irish Sign Language
- NGT:
Sign Language of the Netherlands
- TİD:
Turkish Sign Language
- TSL:
Taiwan Sign Language
Other
- SOV:
Subject-Object-Verb
- SMVOM:
Subject-Modal-Verb-Object-Modal
- MSVOM:
Modal-Subject-Verb-Object-Modal
- NMMs:
Non-manual markers
- IX1 :
Index – First person singular
- IX2 :
Index – Second person singular
- IX3:
Index – Third person singular
- GEN:
Genitive
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