A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) is a comprehensive presentation of grammatical properties of Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili, TİD). Its goal is to provide a resource for TİD signers, students, interpreters, linguists and other researchers, and all those interested in the study of TİD. Reference grammars are necessary for many different scientific and applied goals, ranging from teaching materials to language assessment, and this grammar tries to address this need in a substantial way. As a digital and on-line product, A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) radically differs from other, more traditional grammars, since it provides hundreds of visual examples, making sign language grammar description much more accessible to the readers.

This grammar, together with the other sign language grammars produced during the SIGN-HUB Horizon 2020 project and made available on the SIGN-HUB platform, has been written with an online grammar writing tool developed during the SIGN-HUB project and provided on the SIGN-HUB platform in open access. This tool provides an embedded, detailed Table of Contents for sign language grammars, which was adopted from SignGram Blueprint.  SignGram Blueprint is the first resource that provides detailed guidelines for grammar descriptions at all levels of a sign language reference grammar and for an introduction to the socio-historical background of the language.

A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) follows the SignGram Blueprint not only in structure but also in style. Following the Blueprint's Manual as well as the guidelines developed during the SIGN-HUB project, it intends to be mostly descriptive, informed by basic insights of well-established theories in sign language linguistics, but not theory-loaded. Benefitting from this grammar requires general knowledge about grammar and grammatical terminology, but the explanations of basic concepts in the text and in the glossary are intended to facilitate comprehension. Therefore, this grammar is intended to be accessible to a general reader, in particular through the extensive use of visual examples (videos and still photos). Moreover, since the table of contents of the grammar is identical to that of the Blueprint, the reader can consult corresponding chapters in the Blueprint if s/he would like to find out more detailed and cross-linguistic information about a grammar point. The grammar descriptions in this online book are based both on the literature that was available at the time of writing and on the findings of new research conducted during the project. A substantial number of linguistic generalizations have been drawn from existing research publications in TİD linguistics as well as from the first grammar of TİD, Dikyuva et al.'s Turkish Sign Language Grammar. Needless to say, errors of interpretation, if there are any, belong to us. In those cases in which different studies reported different or contradicting observations regarding the linguistic point in question, the authors opted for neutrality, and all reported observations have been described in the grammar as possibilities or variations. Note also that, in accordance with the style of a reference grammar, references to the works from which the descriptions and generalizations were drawn have not been provided in the text but under the References section at the end of each chapter. 

The team of senior and junior researchers who conducted new research to uncover hitherto uninvestigated linguistic phenomena of TİD and who developed this online grammar was coordinated by the Department of Linguistics, Boğaziçi University over a duration of four years, thanks to the Horizon 2020 SIGN-HUB project.

This first edition of A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) is by no means a complete reference grammar of TİD. Rather, it intends to provide the foundation of a comprehensive grammar with its detailed Table of Contents and its state-of-the-art tools that enable the readers to have easy access to the visual examples. It invites researchers and language professionals to take up the challenge of extending and improving it in a collective effort. Future research will contribute to the widening of knowledge about TİD, and new findings will be integrated in future versions of this grammar.

Structure of the grammar

The grammar is divided into six parts, each one organized into chapters. The first part is devoted to introducing the social and historical background in which Turkish Sign Language has developed, and the remaining five parts describe the properties of the main grammatical components of the language, namely, its phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. The grammar does not contain the seventh part of the SignGram Blueprint, namely Semantics. The semantic concepts are explained throughout the grammar where necessary, and the reader is encouraged to consult the relevant sections in this part of the Blueprint for more detailed discussion of the concepts.

Each chapter is organized into sections and subsections. It is also followed by three informative sections that are not numbered: "Information on data and consultants", "References", and "Authorship information". The first of these sections provides information about the data gathered in order to produce the grammar descriptions in that chapter. This also includes information about the language consultants and the models of the visual examples, where relevant. This is important because it might give information about the particular variety represented in the description. Variation within the TİD community is well-known, but not studied comprehensively for all linguistic phenomena, so this piece of information might help identify from which variety certain generalizations have been drawn. Future TİD corpus research will help complete the picture.

Since writing this grammar involved producing content for the sections that were already provided in the Table of Contents of the SIGN-HUB grammar writing tool, the reader will also find that many (sub-)sections lack content, or that the descriptions provided are not exhaustive. The absence of content may be due to the lack of available research results or the absence of the linguistic phenomenon in TİD. In these cases, the headings of the sections are still visible due to the structure of the grammar tool. However, in order to remain faithful to the style of a reference grammar book, sections whose content is absent or incomplete are not marked as such. In some cases, this is explicitly mentioned under the section at the end of the chapter where information on data and consultants is provided.

Many linguistic phenomena have properties related to different domains of the grammar, that is, they can have phonological, morphological, syntactic, and other properties. Therefore, in many cases, the reader will find that the same grammar point is described in different parts of the grammar. These connections are established via cross-references to related sections. Needless to say, the search function and the detailed structure of the Table of Contents serve as the basic navigation tools.

After the Introduction, the reader can find a list of the abbreviations of the grammatical terms and the non-manual markers used in the examples, and an (adapted) list of notational conventions compiled during the SIGN-HUB project and followed throughout this grammar. The grammar is followed by a complete list of references and a glossary of grammatical terms for basic concepts that are taken for granted in the text and not explained there.

A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) is currently offered only in English, but versions in TİD and Turkish are also planned for the future.

The SIGN-HUB project

SIGN-HUB was carried out by a European research consortium to provide an innovative and inclusive resource hub for the linguistic, historical and cultural documentation of the heritage of European Deaf communities and for sign language assessment in clinical intervention and school settings.

To this end, we created an open, state-of-the-art digital platform with customized accessible interfaces. The project initially fed that platform with core content in the following domains, expandable in the future to other sign languages: (i) digital grammar descriptions of seven sign languages, produced with a new online grammar writing tool; (ii) an interactive digital atlas of linguistic structures of the world's sign languages; (iii) online sign language assessment instruments for education and clinical intervention, and (iv) the first digital archive of life narratives by elderly signers, subtitled and partially annotated for linguistic properties.

These components, made available for the first time through a centralized platform to specialists and to the general public, should (a) help explore and value the identity and the cultural, historical and linguistic assets of Deaf signing communities, (b) advance linguistic knowledge on the natural languages of the Deaf, and (c) impact on the diagnosis of language deficits within these minorities.

The project involved participation of 10 teams from 7 countries:  France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, and Turkey.

Website of the platform: sign-hub.eu