A Grammar of German Sign Language (DGS)

Topics are the elements in discourse that are talked or signed about. In DGS, topics are generally marked by raised eyebrows and they usually appear sentence-initially. Topics are often topicalized, slightly separated from the clause by a tiny pause and/or a head nod and the raised eye brows spread across the topic itself. We find sentence topics and discourse topics (see example below). The latter refer to topics that are discussed throughout bigger units of discourse.

The weather [discourse topic] is great. The sun [sentence topic] is shining all day in the north.

Discourse topics can be divided into silent and new discourse topics. New discourse topics have to be explicitly marked prosodically or syntactically in DGS. As for silent topics, DGS is a topic-drop language. The topics and also the pronominal reference to topics may be dropped if the topic has been previously established in discourse. This is for example the case, if discourse topics are clearly recognizable due to locative information. Locative information can be retrieved from agreement verbs [Morphology 3.1] and from classifier handshapes [Morphology 5] in entity or object-classifiers. Temporal information is also a common discourse topic that is not necessarily referred back to during discourse.

Furthermore, buoys [Pragmatics 2.2.3] in DGS can also be seen as a silent discourse topic, as the topic is held in the signing space with one hand while the discourse/comment about it continues on the other hand.

Concerning discourse topics, which are usually stressed, contrastive and often subtopics of a main topic, DGS exhibits a clear tendency to topicalize the elements and clearly mark them non-manually by raised eye brows. The establishment of new topics or topic shifts clearly requires more marking than topic continuity. There are some signs as seen in the example below that explicitly indicate a topic shift.

           topic aside (‘Thema beiseite’)

 relation (‘Bezug’)


 
 

(Happ & Vorköper 2006: 428)

The non-manual marking of contrastive topics is the same as in new topics, namely raised eyebrows accompanying the topic constituent and a prosodic break between the topic and the comment.