The phonology of focus in Sign Language of the Netherlands

Abstract

Signed languages are similar to spoken languages in the overall organisation of their grammars, displaying a prosodic level of organisation that is not isomorphic to the syntactic organisation. Their rich inventory of manual and non-manual features allows for a prolific range of functions if used prosodically. New data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT, Nederlandse Gebarentaal) are discussed to demonstrate that focused constituents are not marked by a single prosodic feature, but rather by multiple properties that can also have other functions in the prosodic phonology of the language. These findings are integrated in an overall model of sign language prosody that emphasises the distinction between phonetic appearance and phonological representation and that allows for the interaction of linguistic and paralinguistic cues in visual communication.