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On the properties of null subjects in sign languages: the case of French Sign Language (LSF)

  • Angélique Jaber EMAIL logo , Caterina Donati and Carlo Geraci
Published/Copyright: September 6, 2022
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Abstract

The typology of subject omission in simple declarative sentences ranges from languages that simply do not allow it like English and French to languages that allow it as long as a minimum degree of topicality is guaranteed like Chinese and Japanese. In between there are various languages in which subject omission is licensed, for example by rich agreement like in Italian and Spanish, or by a particular set of grammatical features like first and second person in Finnish, or tense like in Hebrew. In other languages subject omission is only limited to expletive sentences like in German. This rich typology observed in spoken languages is also attested across sign languages, with one important exception: there is no known sign language disallowing subject omission categorically. The goals of this paper are twofold: first, we apply syntactic and semantic tests to assess the boundaries of subject omission in French Sign Language and characterize it within the typology; second, we discuss in light of some particular aspects of grammars in the visual modality this apparent anomaly of sign languages.


Corresponding author: Angélique Jaber, Département d’Etudes Cognitives, ENS/Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle/Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013): ERC H2020 Grant Agreement No. 788077–Orisem (PI: Schlenker). Part of the research was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives (ENS), which is supported by grants ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*, ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, and ANR- 17-EURE-0017 FrontCog. Some of the research summarized in this paper is part of the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the grant agreement No 693349. This work was also partly supported by the program “Investissements d’Avenir” ANR-10-LABX-0083 (Labex EFL).

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Published Online: 2022-09-06
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

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