Polar interrogatives in catalan sign language (lsc)a comprehensive grammatical analysis

Abstract

This thesis provides a morphosyntactic description of polar questions and a pragmatic analysis of biased questions in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Polar questions in LSC are obligatorily marked with a specific combination of non-manual marking features and optionally marked with a question particle. Given that, at least, the most prominent feature, eyebrow position, does not remain constant, LSC displays different combinations of non-manuals to mark this structure. Empirical evidence supports an analysis in which each combination of non-manuals conveys a different bias and a novel feature-based description system explains and predicts those. Therefore, each combination of non-manuals, as well as the appearance of the question particle, is shown to not only mark sentence type but also to encode specific pragmatic meanings.