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A Descriptive Grammar of Morphosyntactic Constructions in Ugandan Sign Language (Ugsl)

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A Descriptive Grammar of Morphosyntactic Constructions in Ugandan Sign Language (Ugsl) A Descriptive Grammar of Morphosyntactic Constructions in Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) by Sam Lutalo-Kiingi A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire February 2014 Student Declaration I declare that while registered as a candidate for the research degree, I have not been a registered candidate or enrolled student for another award of the University or other academic or professional institution. I declare that no material contained in the thesis has been used in any other submission for an academic award and is solely my own work. Signature of Candidate_______________________________________ Type of Award Doctor of Philosophy School School of Language Literature and International Studies (SOLLIS) 2 ABSTRACT The Ugandan Deaf Community, consisting of approximately 25,000 sign language users, has seen significant developments in its recent history. Government recognition of sign language, establishment of schools for the deaf, and the beginnings of research into Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) have been important milestones. While Deaf Ugandans are entering university level education for the first time, a number of challenges to the community remain. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic structures of UgSL in order to produce a description of the language‟s morphosyntax. There is a close relationship between word (or sign) properties and syntactic expressions, so UgSL is described here in terms of its morphosyntactic constructions, rather than a differentiation between morphological and syntactic features (cf. Croft 2001; Wilkinson 2013:260). While a substantial number of such descriptions exist for languages outside of Africa, this thesis is the first attempt at describing the morphosyntax of an African sign language. Many African sign languages are severely under-documented, and some are endangered. This study uses an inductive approach and a corpus-based methodology, examining how UgSL signers construct utterances of morphosyntactic complexity. The thesis is in three parts: part I is an introduction and overview of UgSL and also provides the theoretical and methodological background; part II provides a preliminary survey of UgSL grammar to provide a sider context for subsequent chapters; and part III is a detailed survey of five morphosyntactic domains of UgSL. The author is a native Deaf user of UgSL and a member of the Ugandan Deaf Community, as well as being fluent in several other sign languages and participating in international communities of Deaf people. 3 To my mother, Harriet Nakazaana Kiingi 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS A Descriptive Grammar of Morphosyntactic Constructions in Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) ................................................................................................ 1 Student Declaration ............................................................................................ 2 ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................... 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................... 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................. 13 ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................. 17 PART I INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW ..................................................... 23 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 24 1.1 Overview of the study .......................................................................... 24 1.1.1 Scope and motivation .................................................................... 24 1.1.2 Structure of the thesis ................................................................... 26 2 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY .............................................................. 28 2.1 The Deaf Community in Uganda .......................................................... 28 2.2 The history of Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) from external influence to government recognition ............................................................................. 30 2.3 UgSL and access to Deaf Education ................................................... 33 2.4 Linguistic research on sign languages and on UgSL ........................... 35 3 THEORY AND METHODOLOGY .............................................................. 39 3.1 General theoretical approach and conceptual considerations ............. 39 3.2 Corpus methodology ............................................................................ 41 3.2.1 The emergence of sign language corpora ..................................... 42 3.2.2 The importance of spontaneous data ............................................ 43 3.2.3 The advantages of corpus-based methods ................................... 45 3.2.4 The challenges of a corpus-based approach ................................ 46 3.3 Introspection ........................................................................................ 47 3.3.1 Use of other signed and spoken/written languages ....................... 48 5 3.4 Ethics ................................................................................................... 49 3.4.1 Informed consent........................................................................... 49 3.4.2 Data protection .............................................................................. 51 3.4.3 Role of the researcher ................................................................... 51 3.5 Data collection and analysis ................................................................ 53 3.5.1 Data sources ................................................................................. 53 3.5.2 Data collected in 2003 ................................................................... 53 3.5.3 Data collected in 2009 ................................................................... 55 3.5.4 Creating the corpus ....................................................................... 57 3.5.5 Representativeness of the corpus ................................................. 58 3.6 Data analysis ....................................................................................... 60 3.7 Working with data ................................................................................ 62 3.7.1 Prioritisation of texts for annotation ............................................... 62 3.7.2 Annotation of the data ................................................................... 63 3.7.3 Annotation principles ..................................................................... 66 3.7.4 Identification of sentence boundaries ............................................ 67 3.7.5 The language of annotation ........................................................... 67 3.7.6 Challenges encountered when annotating the data ...................... 69 3.8 Structuring the thesis ........................................................................... 70 PART II SURVEY OF UgSL GRAMMAR: PRELIMINARIES ............................ 72 4 SURVEY OF UgSL GRAMMAR: PRELIMINARIES ................................... 73 4.1 Introduction .......................................................................................... 73 4.2 Classification of signs .......................................................................... 74 4.2.1 Previous approaches to sign classifications .................................. 74 4.3 Sign formation processes .................................................................... 86 4.3.1 Sequential compounding ............................................................... 86 4.3.2 Simultaneous compounding .......................................................... 88 4.3.3 Other complex signs ...................................................................... 90 6 4.4 Inflectional categories .......................................................................... 91 4.4.1 Number ......................................................................................... 91 4.4.2 Person ........................................................................................... 91 4.4.3 Tense ............................................................................................ 92 4.4.4 Aspect ........................................................................................... 92 4.4.5 Degree .......................................................................................... 97 4.5 Signing space ...................................................................................... 97 4.5.1 Spatial modification of signs in UgSL ............................................ 97 4.5.2 Directionality ................................................................................ 101 4.5.3 Pronouns ..................................................................................... 103 4.5.4 Classifiers .................................................................................... 104 4.5.5 Time lines .................................................................................... 110 4.6 Non-manual features ......................................................................... 114 4.7 Sign order patterns of UgSL .............................................................. 119 4.7.1 Spoken and sign languages „word order‟ .................................... 119 4.7.2 UgSL sign order
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