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Interrogative Constructions in Signed Languages: Crosslinguistic Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Ulrike Zeshan
Ulrike Zeshan*
Affiliation:
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen
*
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Postbus 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands [Ulrike.Zeshan@mpi.nl]
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Abstract

This article reports on results from a broad crosslinguistic study based on data from thirty-five signed languages around the world. The study is the first of its kind, and the typological generalizations presented here cover the domain of interrogative structures as they appear across a wide range of geographically and genetically distinct signed languages. Manual and nonmanual ways of marking basic types of questions in signed languages are investigated. As a result, it becomes clear that the range of crosslinguistic variation is extensive for some subparameters, such as the structure of question-word paradigms, while other parameters, such as the use of nonmanual expressions in questions, show more similarities across signed languages. Finally, it is instructive to compare the findings from signed language typology to relevant data from spoken languages at a more abstract, crossmodality level.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 7 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

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