Lecture
Iconicity in the syntax of sign languages
This talk discusses an iconic mapping of scope relations in sign languages: The higher the scope of a syntactic operator the higher its expression on the body will be. While operators taking scope above tense are systematically expressed via facial non-manual markers, operators taking scope between tense and the vP are signed manually. Categories scoping inside the vP, in contrast, are expressed via a manipulation of the movement path of the verb sign. While the data will mainly come from German Sign Language, the observed mapping seems to be universally found in sign languages.