We will read Barberà (2016), a work on domain widening and narrowing in American Sign Language.

READING: Barberà. ‘Indefiniteness and specificity marking in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)’ (2016).

WHEN: Friday 4 November 2022, 14:00 - 15:00 (Amsterdam time)

LOCATION: ILLC Seminar Room - F1.15

PDF: https://formal-semantics.github.io/download/barbera2016.pdf

ABSTRACT:

Bringing together the areas of sign language semantics-pragmatics interface and discourse reference, this article offers a description of how indefiniteness and (non‑)specificity is encoded in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). By using a combined methodology of corpus data and grammatical tests, the present study shows that the encoding of indefiniteness and specificity in LSC is achieved by three main means, namely lexical signs, the use of nonmanuals, and the use of signing space. The basic primitives required to analyze specificity in LSC comprise wide scope, epistemicity, and partitivity. This article proposes an analysis of the use of signing space in contributing meaning and provides insights into the characterization of the abstract import of signing space.