A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

The information in PHONOLOGY 3.1.3 and 3.4.1 is based on Crasborn (2001), who described these phenomena based on a pilot study with two informants and on a larger study with six informants. In the pilot study, the signers were given a list of 30 glosses and were asked to sign these glosses three times: first, within a self-made-up context in a neutral way; second, while imaging that it concerned a private conversation with someone close-by; and third, while imagining that the addressee was standing very far away. In the follow-up study, six fluent signers from the Voorburg and Amsterdam area participated. The stimuli concerned 52 signs, which were listed in a different and random order for each participant and each condition. The three conditions were designed to elicit neutral forms, soft (or whispered) forms and loud (or shouted) forms, respectively. One of the participants signed the 52 stimuli signs in only two conditions and was asked to provide a context for every sign. The other five participants signed the 52 signs in all the conditions and were asked to make up a context for every third sign on their list. Crasborn’s intention was to control for signs with different phonological specifications, but the informants sometimes used variants or articulated the signs slightly differently. This made a comparison of the results between conditions and controlling for other factors that could influence phonetic articulation challenging. Another remark is that the informants of the pilot study indicated that for some signs, it felt unnatural to sign them particularly small or large, which had to do with the semantics of these signs. Lastly, as Crasborn (2001) also points out, it should be noted that the methodology of the follow-up study did not effectively elicit small signing.

The information on weak hand drop is mainly drawn from a paper by van der Kooij (2001). She made a selection of 328 two-handed signs in which all types of two-handed signs were represented, and asked her informants whether one-handed versions of these signs would be acceptable. If at least two informants found this to be the case, she listed the sign as allowing weak drop. Her informants were three female native signers from the Western part of the Netherlands, age 35-45.

The effect of cliticization is described based on an unpublished paper by van Boven (2018), for which the data came from the Corpus NGT (see Introduction to the thesis). The examples were collected by her, and recreated or checked by me. As for the information on focus, mentioned in Section 3.4.1, both van der Kooij et al. (2006) and Kimmelman (2014, 2019) used elicited data (from tests specifically designed to elicit focus). Van der Kooij et al. (2006) elicited sentence pairs from six signers from diverse language backgrounds. Kimmelman (2014, 2019) had six female and four male signers, with a mean age of 29, and coming mostly from the Amsterdam region. Signers had to answer questions in relation to depicted situations, and describe pictures.

                All examples of the phonological processes described in Chapter 3 are Klomp’s, with the exception of read in Section 3.1.4, and post^lamp in Section 3.1.7. Additionally, the full descriptions of assimilation, coalescence, nativization, epenthesis, and syllable reduction are hers, although the discussion of the nativized workshop example was inspired by the example provided in the SignGram Blueprint, where the same instance is described for Italian Sign Language (Quer et al. 2017), and the description of metathesis in ‘ear, nose and throat doctor’ was inspired by Klomp’s former sign language teacher Joni Oyserman.