A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

Most of this chapter is based on the PhD dissertation of Zwitserlood (2003). She indicates that she, in some cases, was able to use “preliminary inventories” of Fortgens et al. (1984), De Clerck (1995), Nijhof (1996), and Zwitserlood (1996) (see Zwitserlood 2003 for full references). Mainly, however, she made use of her own elicited data. She elicited both shorter texts (individual sentences) and longer texts from four signers, and discussed this data later with two informants, of which one had also participated in the elicitation tasks. The five signers involved were all native signers. One of them grew up in Amsterdam, the others in Voorburg, meaning that only the Western variants of NGT were represented. The signers were between 30 and 35 years old when they were tested, and two were male, and three female. There were three types of elicitation, of which two were pointed at eliciting sentences, and one at eliciting longer signed texts. The elicitation material was purely visual, meaning that no written or spoken text was used, and contained a variety of entities (see Zwitserlood 2003, p. 69 and 70 for a complete list), including non-existing entities. The first type of elicitation contained the description of a line drawing by the signer, and the selection of the descripted drawing out of four options by the addressee. The second type involved comics, of which the signer described every image separately, and as concisely as possible. The third type included comics and video clips, which the signer had to describe in a coherent story. The addressee subsequently had to re-tell the story, based on the signer’s input. The full elicitation session was guided by a deaf research assistant, and data was collected from both the primary signers and their addressees.

            As for my own contribution, I divided the data from Zwitserlood over several tables in this chapter and construed the tables on bodypart classifiers and SASS myself. I checked the information in the tables with a (near-)native signer, who is around 60 years old and now lives in the Amsterdam region, but was raised in the South of the Netherlands. This led to the removal of some (old-fashioned) examples and the addition of some (currently) more prototypical examples, and to the re-ordering of some hand configurations throughout the tables.