Volume 29, Issue 1

This study examines the kono … noni construction from semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions. It suggests that this construction as a whole expresses a concessive meaning of an unexpected event happening in a temporary and generally perceived adverse situation which the speaker is currently in. It proposes common semantic characteristics of the adjectives that are allowed to occur in this construction, clarifies the function of the proximal demonstrative kono, which expresses a sense of personal connection to an event, and shows the compositional nature of noni, in which no denotes a duration within this construction. It also suggests that speaker disapproval is strongly associated with the construction, while such meaning is not inherent in the construction itself.

This paper offers basic observations about wh-questions in JSL with clause-final wh-signs, i.e., wh-finals. Basic word order of matrix wh-sentences in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) have been reported by previous studies such as Morgan (2006), Fischer and Gong (2010), Kimura (2011), and Akahori and Oka (2011), among others, which reported that wh-signs can appear in the clause-final position in addition to clause-initial and in-situ positions. In order to investigate the syntactic mechanism of JSL wh-constructions, it is also necessary to confirm basic syntactic properties of wh-signs in embedded clauses. However, distributions of wh-signs in embedded clauses have not been fully investigated in previous studies. Based on the discussion on the word order of sentences with direct and indirect speech in JSL in Uchibori et al. (2011), this paper demonstrates that wh-signs occur in embedded clauses that are not instances of direct speech (or quotations) of wh-questions, but those of syntactically embedded indirect speech. In embedded clauses, wh-finals appear as in the matrix wh-questions. Relevant theoretical issues are discussed concerning the relation between linear properties (i.e., distributions of wh-expressions) and the structural properties of natural language.

As we consider the unique linguistic properties of Japanese Sign Language (Nihon Shuwa, JSL), it is important to note that cultural gestures of hearing Japanese were adopted into JSL and “grammaticized” to become a part of the language. Polarity-sensitive mouth gestures are discussed as an interesting example of grammaticized gestures in JSL. Matsuoka et al. (2012) reported that “polarity-sensitive” mouth gestures appear in antonym pairs in emphatic contexts. The choice of mouth gestures is determined by the positive/negative polarity of the signed adjectives. We investigated those polarity-sensitive mouth gestures with absolute and relative adjectives (specifically Kennedy and McNally’s 2005 “totally closed/totally open adjectives”) and argue that those mouth gestures themselves are intensifiers and the choice of the mouth gesture reflects the semantic properties of the adjective it accompanies. In addition, the data of eyebrow raise/furrow are provided to demonstrate that lexical and attitudinal polarity is expressed by different non-manuals.