Wh-movement in British Sign Language
| dc.contributor.advisor | Alboiu, Gabriela | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Avery, Peter | |
| dc.contributor.author | Williams, Britton | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-10-03T17:04:34Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-10-03T17:04:34Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-08-07 | |
| dc.description.abstract | British Sign Language (BSL) is the language of the D/deaf community of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (UK)1. BSL serves as the language of a thriving, vibrant D/deaf culture in the UK, in which it is used in the same range of genres as any other natural language; in formal settings, day-to-day conversations, the arts, and so on. BSL enjoys a high degree of institutional support, and there are a number of entities which encourage the languageās continued use (Deuchar, 1984: 33-45); it is estimated that between 80 000 and 100 000 D/deaf people use BSL in England alone (Rogers et al., 2018: 2). The linguistic study of BSL began in the late 1970s, when prominent researchers such as James Kyle, Bencie Woll and Margret Deuchar described aspects of BSL syntax and phonology previously unrecorded. These efforts were initially to augment education opportunities for D/deaf individuals in the UK (Woll et al., 1981: 105), though BSL linguistics would eventually become an independent area of study, spearheaded by those first researchers, and later prominent linguists such as Rachel Sutton-Spence. Contemporary BSL linguists have established themselves at the forefront of sign language research and documentation: one of the most impressive achievements in sign language documentation, the British Sign Language Corpus Project (BSLCP), aims to document and transcribe various aspects of BSL linguistic variation. The team behind the BSLCP is composed of Kearsy Cormier, Adam Schembri, Jordan Fenlon, Gabrielle Hodge, Sannah Gulamani, Neil Fox, Heidi Procto, and Matt Brown. Following in the footsteps of these researchers, this project describes aspects of wh-movement in BSL. As is to be seen, wh-movement is a particularly controversial facet of sign language syntax; my objective in the analysis of BSL wh-movement is to determine whether it may provide further insight into key points of interest discussed in recent sign language literature, as well as describe some of its features. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10315/42339 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | British Sign Language | |
| dc.subject | Syntax | |
| dc.subject | wh-movement | |
| dc.title | Wh-movement in British Sign Language | |
| dc.type | Research Paper |