Nonmanual behaviors in pluractionality: A view from Turkish Sign Language

Grazer Linguistische Studien, cilt.93, ss.34-54, 2021 (Hakemli Dergi)

From the point of typology, the phenomenon of event plurality

– pluractionality is a widespread grammatical construction, entailing

the notion of multitude of events in so many languages. On

the basis of TİD data, this preliminary paper reports the fact that the

morphological modification of the verb to express the plurality of

event is not restricted to manual markers in sign languages (SLs),

and also the semantic portrayal of the nonmanual pluractional forms

raised interesting modality specific theoretical ─ ─ issues. Firstly,

TİD has also a distinctive nonmanual pluractional morpheme (/PC/)

that specifies distribution over participants or time in the verbal domain

and fits into an overall semantic typology of pluractionality in

the spoken modality. Secondly, body-anchored verbs may be inflected

with both manual reduplication and a slight body shift to indicate

pluractionality as well. Thirdly, the combination of /PC/ with

an arc movement in lateral displacement (/PC-ARC/) ties the subevents

to different participants over time. Building on iconic mappings

in the signed modality, it can be suggested that the pictorial

properties of verb motion must not be limited to manual forms in the

visibility of pluractionality. By attempting to define the limitations of

nonmanual markers, more semantic description can be obtained to