Word order and definiteness in sign languages
Word order, definiteness, intensionality, TİD, ASL
Word order in sign languages has been investigated from different perspectives. Among others, Napoli and Sutton-Spence (2017) argue that the existence of the object argument is the determinant of the word order (extensionality vs. intensionality). But this raises a further question: If the existence of the arguments is prominent in determining the word order, does the semantics of the verb still matter? Or do we observe any differences in the word order with the intensional verbs depending on the existence of their object? If it is the case, is it possible to draw a parallelism between this issue and the distinction between de re / de dicto readings? This brings us to the topic of definiteness. I investigate the word order of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) and American Sign Language, which are SOV and SVO languages by default, respectively, to see whether we observe similar semantic effects.