A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

The information in MORPHOLOGY 2.2.1 on the negative affixes is mostly original; it is based on personal observations, on lexical items from the NGC dictionary (Schermer & Koolhof (eds.) 2009), discussions with two (near-)native deaf signers, and the results from a questionnaire that was answered by four deaf signers. In the questionnaire – which was presented in both Dutch and NGT, with the possibility to answer in either language – we asked participants explicitly on their use of the prefix un-, whether they associated this sign with signers from a specific region or age, and whether they found the eleven examples that we provided – eleven combinations of un- with several adjectives and verbs – acceptable. The six consulted signers went to school in different parts of the Netherlands and varied in age between 27 to 60 years old. One of them is late-deaf and learned to sign first through formal education (to become a teacher of NGT), and later via peers, the others are (near-)native signers.

The information in MORPHOLOGY 2.1.2.1 on noun-verb pairs is based on Schreurs (2006) and Spruijt (2017). Schreurs (2006) is a master’s thesis, and her results are based on 24 noun-verb pairs, which she elicited through a translation task. In this task, her five participants (mostly from Amsterdam) were asked to translate 60 Dutch written sentences into NGT. She also performed a dictionary study, but outcomes from this part of her study are not included in this chapter, since data from real language use are considered more informative in this respect than dictionary data. Spruijt (2017) concerns a bachelor’s thesis, which was co-supervised by me, and which was a corpus study. Her descriptions of nouns and verbs are based on 164 tokens of nine nouns and 283 tokens of the related nine verbs.

The information in MORPHOLOGY 2.2.1 on nominal non-manual diminutive and augmentative marking is partly based on Zandee’s bachelor’s thesis (2018), which is a corpus-based study of 28 diminutive markings and 24 augmentative markings, and which Ulrika Klomp co-supervised. The general description of the non-manual markers is based on her results. Additionally, MORPHOLOGY 2.2.1 is based on Klomp’s analyses of Zandee’s data as well as additional corpus data, which yielded more detailed results on the markers and their scope. She also extracted examples of verbal non-manual diminutive marking from Zandee’s data.

The information in MORPHOLOGY 2.2.4 on mouth actions in noun-verb pairs is based on Schermer (1990), Schreurs (2006), Bank (2014), and Spruijt (2017). The results of Schermer (1990) are based on data from six participants (from Groningen and Amsterdam). The data consists of signed translations of Dutch written stories, signed stories derived from a picture-book, and spontaneous conversations. Bank (2014) did a corpus study on a selected part of the Corpus NGT (involving only signers from Groningen and Amsterdam). His results are based on 653 tokens from 13 frequent nouns and verbs (not formally or semantically related).