[PLing] Talk by Evgeniia Khristoforova, 22 June, 14:45

[Lena Lohninger]

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce that Evgeniia Khristoforova (Universtiy of
Amsterdam) will give a talk on "Exploring Complementation Strategies in
Sign Languages: Insights from the Sign Language of the Netherlands and
Russian Sign Language" on 22 June, 14:45, Seminarraum 2, Sensengasse 3A
as part of the FWF project Implicational hierarchies in clausal
complementation (PI Susi Wurmbrand).

We cordially invite you to join us there! The abstract can be found below.

Best,
Magdalena Lohninger


ABSTRACT:

Complementation strategies, which refer to the ways in which clauses
function as  object arguments of the main clause, exhibit extensive
  cross-linguistic variation. Recent typological research has shown that
while languages may differ in how they differentiate complementation
types, the semantic classes of predicates selecting for the same types
of complements remain consistent. This observation is captured by the
Implication Complementation Hierarchy (ICH) (Wurmbrand & Lohninger,
2019), which categorizes complement classes into three broad semantic
classes, ‑ Events, Situations, and Propositions, - and further maps them
on different clause sizes to explain their consistently variable
morphosyntax across spoken languages. The ICH has proven instrumental in
explaining the diverse complement clause markers found in spoken
languages, but there is limited knowledge regarding the applicability of
the ICH to sign language data, despite the accumulating evidence for a
diverse typology of complement clauses in sign languages.

In this talk, I would like to address this issue by first providing an
introduction to sign languages, focusing on their syntactic complexity.
I will then delve into the latest research on complementation in sign
languages. Finally, I will present my study on different types of
complement clauses in the Sign Language of the Netherlands, where  I
found that Proposition complements in this sign language exhibit less
variable sign order patterns compared to Event/Situation complements.
Time permitting, we will also examine the Russian Sign Language data,
which presents a very different way of marking complement types,
characterized by agreement deficiency. The findings from Russian Sign
Language and the Sign Language of the Netherlands confirm the
modality-independent nature of the ICH and sheds light on the mechanisms
underlying the rich typology of complementation strategies across
different languages and modalities.
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