A Grammar of German Sign Language (DGS)

The section on parts of speech deals with those items in a language lexicon that are above the phonological level, above affixes and below syntactical phrases. In the following, we introduce several classes of lexical items of DGS, i.e. functional signs as well as content signs, and discuss the challenges of their classification. We distinguish between open-class elements, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbials etc., which contain many signs and are a productive class; and close-classed elements, such as determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, etc., which contain comparatively few signs in DGS and are less productive. For some signs in DGS, it is particularly difficult to define in which part of speech they can be categorized. This is especially the case for certain noun-verb pairs, such as student (N) – study (V), as well as for some determiners and pronouns, both articulated with the pointing sign index. One of the main reasons for the difficulty in classification is that the phonological form of a sign gives no clear-cut indication about the status of the sign, e.g. whether it is a noun or a verb. Hence, in the following sections, we examine the existence of the different types of parts of speech in DGS, and provide representative examples.