A Grammar of German Sign Language (DGS)

Common nouns like cat, coffee, or book are nouns that denote classes of entities that contain more than one item. These stand in contrast to proper nouns and sign names like aris or peter, which denote only one unique entity, like a specific person, city, or place. Common nouns can be internally classified according to semantic properties of their meaning, such as referring to abstract or concrete entities.

 

 

An example of a common noun referring to a class of concrete entities is house, as seen in the following.

 

house

 

 

A representative of a common noun referring to a class of abstract entities is idea, as seen below.

 

idea

 

 

Although many nouns that refer to cognitive states – such as idea, knowledge, philosophy, professor – are articulated at the signer’s head, there is no phonological distinction between abstract and concrete common nouns in DGS. For example, the abstract noun mathematics as well as the concrete noun rain are both not body-anchored and articulated in neutral signing space.

 

A further semantic classification of common nouns can be distinguished with regard to the countability of the entities that are denoted by the noun. A count noun describes a class of entities that can – in principle – be counted, such as dog, tree or child; whereas a mass noun denotes a class of entities that describes a large body of matter, which is uncountable itself, such as water, money or sand.

 

sand

 

 

Since mass nouns in DGS describe classes of uncountable entities, these nouns do not inflect for number [Morphology 4.]. In contrast, count nouns in DGS can inflect for number. However, the type of number inflection depends on some phonological parameters of the noun sign. The noun child is a single-handed, non-body-anchored sign in neutral signing space. It will inflect for plural by reduplication and a sideward movement of the sign. Instead, the noun tree is a two-handed sign, in which the non-dominant hand has contact with the dominant arm, signed in neutral signing space. tree will inflect for plural by only adding a sideward movement to the sign. And, the body-anchored noun dog cannot be morphologically inflected for plural. For body-anchored nouns like dog, a numeral sign like three or a quantifier sign like many [Lexicon 3.10.] has to indicate the plurality.

Nouns that are related to a specific object or entity are semantically easy to identify as nouns. However, for some signs it is more difficult to identify whether the sign is a noun or a verb, because both forms are phonologically identical or very similar and have the same semantic basis. In these cases, the sentence context gives a clue about the status of the verb, as can be seen in the following example.

 

                                                     re          hn

a. frankfurt old airplane ix(loc)_a ix(dem)_a color green

‘In Frankfurt there is an old airplane that is green.’

 

        

b. last year ix₁ new-zealand ₁fly_3a

‘Last year, I flew to New Zealand.’

 

 

In DGS, the noun airplane and the verb fly are both produced with a very similar phonological form. The sign is articulated with a f-handshape and moves in a short arc-movement within the signing space. Hence, the nominal or verbal function of the sign can only be detected in distributional terms, that is, by its place of occurrence within the sentence. Thus, for some signs in DGS the classification status of verb or noun can only be clarified either by the syntactic or the semantic context, or in some cases also by the mouthing of the sign [Phonology 1.5.2. ].

This incident of phonologically identical nouns and verbs such as airplane and fly relates to two groups of noun-verb pairs that are formed by derivation [Morphology 2.]. The first group contains object nouns and their verbal derivatives that express the handling or the action of the object as shown in a): scissors – cut, window – open_window, iron (N) – iron (V), airplane – fly, , hammer (N) – hammer (V), etc. The second group contains reciprocal verbs and a derived noun denoting the acting out of the verb as in example b): negotiate – negotiation, meet – meeting, discuss – discussion, give-feedback – feedback, etc.

a. verb-noun pairs: scissors – cut, window – open_window, iron (N) – iron (V), airplane – fly

 

 

b. verb-noun pairs: negotiate – negotiation, meet – meeting, discuss – discussion, give-feedback – feedback

 

 

 

Although this cannot be an extensive list of phonological identical noun-verb pairs, it shows that there is a semantic relation between those noun-verb pairs that are phonological similar/identical compared to other nouns that have no verbal counterpart.