A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

The Dutchman Bernard Tervoort was the first linguist worldwide to describe a sign language, in his case, aspects of the grammar and lexicon of NGT. In the 1950s, he conducted research at the Instituut voor Doven (Institute for the Deaf), the deaf school in Sint Michielsgestel (see also SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND  2.4), to describe the influence of the “esoteric language” of these children (i.e., their signs) on the “exoteric language” of the hearing society (i.e., Dutch) (Tervoort 1953). As part of his research, he needed to thoroughly analyze the signs that were used. He designed several tasks that a selected group of children had to perform, and concluded from his data that the signs were part of a language: many signs had a fixed form-meaning relationship, and he saw indications of morphological and syntactic categorization. Moreover, it was obvious that the children had no difficulty communicating with signs, and understood each other well. One task turned out to be more difficult for the participants, because they had to perform the task with a cloth covering their mouths – consequently, articulated words and some facial expressions were not visible anymore, and this caused their conversation to go less smoothly. From this, Tervoort recognized the importance of non-manual elements, though at the time, he considered them to be non-linguistic. 

Because of the great share of “mimicking” and “depicting” (translation U.Klomp)  (Tervoort 1953: 100) in his data, and because of his observation that the language seemed to be bound to specific groups of children, he labeled it a “primitive” language (Tervoort 1953: 289). Nevertheless, he had no doubts that this primitiveness was not due to the visual character of the language. Moreover, he states that manual signs and acoustic signals are equally suitable as linguistic symbols – an extremely modern claim at the time.

As mentioned in SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 1.4, William Stokoe was the first international scholar who studied a sign language, in his case, the phonological structure of American Sign Language (Stokoe 1960). It became established that sign languages are full-fledged languages, and linguists started to take increased interest in this new field. We provide a brief overview of the start of sign language linguistics in the Netherlands, focusing on work that has been done in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bernard Tervoort continued working on NGT, and he and others published a book on “new insights into the communication of the deaf” (Tervoort (ed.) 1983). Subsequently, a first phonological analysis of handshapes was conducted by Rita Harder & Trude Schermer (1986). The second dissertation on NGT, written by Schermer on the influence of Dutch on NGT, came out in 1990. Research on morpho-syntactic aspects of NGT had started in 1988 with an exploratory report on person and location marking by Heleen Bos, Lies Alons, Wim Emmerik, Beppie van den Bogaerde (previously Hulst), Petra Kern, Mari-Janne Padmos & Debora Timmerman; Bos (1990) continued to focus on this topic, and on agreement in general (1993). Jane Coerts (1990, 1992) investigated syntactic aspects and the role of non-manual markers and worked together with Anne Baker (previously Mills) and Beppie van den Bogaerde on acquisition and language pathology (several papers and posters on this subject are listed in Crasborn et al. (1999)). Van den Bogaerde’s dissertation on language input and interaction in deaf families was published in 2000. Harry Knoors also studied acquisition, specifically of agreement and of the use of signing space (1992). In 1991, a first book was published on the grammar of NGT by Trude Schermer, Connie Fortgens, Rita Harder & Esther de Nobel (now Dhara de Nobel).

During the 1990s, research into the phonology and phonetics of NGT started at Leiden University with key figures Harry van der Hulst, Onno Crasborn, and Els van der Kooij. A list of their early work can be found in Crasborn et al. (1999), but two examples are the publication by van der Hulst (1996) on the phonological analysis of the non-dominant hand, and the study by Crasborn & van der Kooij (1997) on relative orientation in sign language phonology. Most members of this research group later transferred to the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

More applied research was carried out at the Koninklijke Ammanstichting (the Royal Amman Foundation), the NSDSK (Dutch Foundation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child), and at the Guyot institute in Groningen (Crasborn et al. 1999). Since then, the field of research has expanded considerably, and numerous papers, theses and dissertations on NGT have been written. All of these works have informed the present dissertation.

Currently, there are several more places in the Netherlands where NGT is being investigated: the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, the Dutch Sign Centre, the University of Amsterdam, and the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. Some of the aforementioned scholars are still active in the field of sign language linguistics.