Focus constructions in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

Abstract

Information structure (IS) notions are present in all human languages, spoken or signed, and are the key to understand how we human organize information in discourse. Due to the fact that signed languages research is very recent, IS notions, such as the focus-ground and the topic-comment distinctions, have not been not described in such an accurate way as they have been in many spoken languages. For Catalan Sign Language (LSC), few studies are found regarding IS notions. Hence, the main goal of the present study is to provide a basic description of the main syntactic and prosodic strategies used to express focus in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). The data analyzed in this study have been collected through elicitation tasks and also through consultation of the LSC corpus, which is currently being annotated. In addition, an overview on the main linguistic studies on IS in SLs is offered.