The discussion of declarative sentences is, compared to other sentence types, usu-ally rather short. I will follow this tradition in this section. As with the following sections, I will first give a short overview of the situation found in spoken lan-guages, followed by a brief description of what is known about the phenomenon under discussion in sign languages and will then describe the situation for DGS.
3.5.1 General overview
As the present and the following chapter include the discussion of non-manual markings, and as non-manual markings in sign languages are often equated with intonation in spoken languages, I will start the discussion of declaratives in spo-ken languages with intonation and then proceed with a brief remark on declara-tives and word order.
Many spoken languages make use of intonational means to distinguish be-tween different sentence types. Although declaratives represent the unmarked case, they are not simply marked by a flat intonational contour in many lan-guages. Instead, spoken languages often seem to pursue the strategy of making declaratives and interrogatives as distinct as possible. In English, for example,
declaratives are prototypically associated with a falling, and interrogatives with a rising intonation (e.g., Gunlogson 2002). This is, however, far from being a universal, as in many languages, for example in Romanian or Hungarian, both declarative and (polar) interrogative sentences receive a raising-falling intona-tional pattern that is very similar in both sentence types (e.g., Ladd 1981).
In the following, I will describe what is known about declarative sentences in sign languages. First, I will briefly discuss non-manual markings, the counter-part of spoken language intonation, and then give a short overview of the con-stituent order typology.
3.5.2 Declaratives in sign languages 3.5.2.1 Non-manual markings
Descriptions of declaratives are, as already noted at the beginning of the section, rather short, despite being the most common and unmarked sentence type. Quer et al. (2017: 289), in the SignGram Blueprint, for example, report:
Sign languages make use of declaratives just like spoken languages. How-ever, the grammar writer will not easily find studies, journal papers, articles, or book chapters devoted to declaratives.
While declaratives in many spoken languages do not usually exhibit a flat intona-tional contour, non-manual markings spreading over the whole clause as found in other sentence types, such as interrogative or imperative sentences, are absent in declaratives – disregarding cases of evaluation, epistemicity, or evidentiality that will be discussed in the next chapter.
3.5.2.2 Declaratives and the basic constituent order in sign languages
Declaratives are important to determine the basic word order of a language (often alternatively called ‘constituent order’ in the sign language linguistics tradition).
A basic declarative sentence in American Sign Language, for example, takes the form illustrated in (51), from Neidle et al. (2000: 81).
(51) American Sign Language john like chocolate
‘John likes chocolate.’
From unmarked examples like the on in (51), it was inferred that the basic word order of American Sign Language is SVO (Fischer 1975). Typologically, the word
order generalizations from research on spoken languages fit well into what is known about sign languages. Based on a sample of 42 sign languages, Napoli &
Sutton-Spence (2014) report that all studied languages either exhibit an SOV or SVO order, with SOV being a grammatical order in all sign languages included in the study. For similar conclusions see Kimmelman (2012).
As in spoken languages, deviations of the basic word orders are described for sign languages. This is, for example, the case with topicalizations and other fore-or backgrounding processes. Besides topicalizations fore-or ffore-or focusing purposes, some other factors leading to word order changes, which are not necessarily fa-miliar based on research on spoken languages, were described for sign languages.
These include the agreement properties of the verb and word order changes in locative sentences. I will briefly discuss both phenomena in the following section, as both are found in German Sign Language.
3.5.3 Declaratives in DGS
3.5.3.1 Non-manual markers in DGS declaratives
Declaratives in DGS are produced without any additional non-manual markings, i.e., the facial expression is neutral, as long as the sentence does not contain any manual signs that are specified for a non-manual, there is no element receiving stress, and no additional layer of information (such as evaluation, epistemicity or role-shift indicating that the information conveyed is reported from a perspective different from the signer’s hic-nunc-ego origo; Bühler 1934) is present. In this respect, DGS behaves just like other sign languages.
3.5.3.2 Some notes on DGS constituent order
As already noted (see Section 2.3), the unmarked word order of German Sign Language is SOV – in matrix and in embedded clauses (Keller 1998; Steinbach &
Herrmann 2013. This is illustrated in (52).
(52) Marjolaine beer buy
‘Marjolaine bought a beer.’
An OV analysis is supported by the fact that determiners and adpositions are found after their complements, and that modals and negation (when expressed manually) follow rather than precede the verb (Pfau & Quer 2007a; Bross & Hole 2017a).
Topicalizations as well as other fore- and backgrounding processes can alter the basic SOV order. While such pragmatic highlighting is usually visible as it is marked non-manually and/or prosodically, there are some cases in which an SVO order is possible without any additional marking. Thus, SOV structures like the one in (53) and SVO structures like in (54) can be used equally. In most cases this concerns volitional verbs like like which I will discuss in Section 4.23.
(53) Marjolaine beer like
‘Marjolaine likes beer.’
(54) Marjolaine like beer
‘Marjolaine likes beer.’
Although SVO orders like in (54) are sometimes found, SOV orders represent the clear majority. Thus, SOV can be taken as the most unmarked constituent order in DGS.
Additionally, the word order in locative sentences usually deviates from the SOV order. As in many other sign languages, locative sentences exhibit an OSV word order in DGS, as illustrated in (55). An alternative analysis would be that sentences of this type in fact do not deviate from the SOV constituent order and instead include two predications as indicated by the second paraphrase.
(55) pond index3afish swim3a
‘Fish were swimming in the pond./There was a pond. Fish were swimming in it.’
For locative sentences as in (55), it is usually argued that the driving force be-hind their constituent order derives from a figure-ground principle which states that grounds (bigger and more immobile referents) are introduced before figures (smaller and more mobile) referents (Volterra et al. 1984; Kimmelman 2012; Pfau
& Bos 2016). Some authors (e.g., Perniss 2007; Özyürek et al. 2010) argue that the driving force behind the word order in locative sentences is iconicity. It seems plausible that this kind of word order variation is driven by pragmatic factors.
It seems to be a general rule of a conversation to first introduce the ground. It would be rather unnatural to utter a sentence likeFish were swimming in the pondwithout the speaker first mentioning that there was a pond or, at least, that s/he was in a garden. While English has a very strict word order, many other lan-guages, including Italian and German, have more freedom in either mentioning the ground or the figure first in locative sentences, as shown for German in (56).
(56) German a. Im
In.the Teich pond
schwammen swam
Fische fish
‘Fish were swimming in the pond.’
b. Fische Fish
schwammen swam
im in.the
Teich pond
‘Fish were swimming in the pond.’
Although this claim needs empirical validation by future studies, it seems that sentences with a figure-ground order as in (56a) are more suitable in situations in which the ground was not mentioned before and the order ground-figure as in (56b) are more natural in situations in which the ground was already introduced in the discourse. My DGS data also points in this direction. While the consultants clearly preferred the ground-figure order (i.e., OSV structures), they also allowed the reverse pattern (i.e., SOV structures) in locative contexts, as shown in Figure 3.5.
Figure 3.5: There are two options for expressing locative sentences in DGS. The top example shows a sentence in which the ground was not introduced in the previous discourse. In the bottom example, the ground was already introduced. The abbreviations ‘LH’ and ‘RH’ stand for left hand and right hand, respectively.
What is interesting about the sentences in Figure 3.5 is that the ground is in-troduced by an index sign in the ground-figure sentence (top example) while this index is missing in the SOV sentence on the bottom of the figure. One could either argue that the ground is introduced first (as in spoken languages) in exam-ples of the first kind leading to a deviation in constituent order or that the order in examples of the first kind, in fact, does not deviate, but that sentences of this kind consist of two clauses: the first one being an existential clause (‘There is a tree’) and the second one being the locative sentence (‘The cat jumped on it’).
Taken together, the vast majority of declarative sentences in DGS that are not highlighted in some way follow a more or less strict SOV pattern. Next, I will discuss polar interrogative sentences. Again, I will briefly outline the situation for spoken languages (Section 3.6.1), followed by a discussion of polar questions in sign languages (Section 3.6.2), and finally, sketch and analyze the phenomenon in DGS (Section 3.6.3).