Semantics of distributivity in Czech Sign Language (Distributivity workshop)

STRACHOŇOVÁ, Hana and Mojmír DOČEKAL. Semantics of distributivity in Czech Sign Language (Distributivity workshop). In Journées Co-distributivité 2018, 22-23 February 2018, Paris. 2018.

Basic information

• Original name: Semantics of distributivity in Czech Sign Language (Distributivity workshop)
• Authors: STRACHOŇOVÁ, Hana (203 Czech Republic) and Mojmír DOČEKAL (203 Czech Republic, belonging to the institution).
• Edition: Journées Co-distributivité 2018, 22-23 February 2018, Paris, 2018.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 60203 Linguistics
• Country of publisher: France
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• RIV identification code: RIV/00216224:14210/18:00102512
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords in English: sign language; czech sign language; distributivity; reduplication
• Tags: rivok

Abstract

Various types of distance distributive (DD) items across natural languages received attention in recent linguistic works. As for Sign Languages (SL), the DD research is presented (among other topics) in Quer (2012), Kimmelman (2015), Kimmelman (2017) & Kuhn (2017) a.o. Following this work we focus on a specific type of reduplication in SL (reduplication on R-loci) which is claimed to be a marker of distributive quantification (i.e. by Kimmelman 2015): a ”distributive reduplication” from now on. By bringing new data from Czech Sign Language(CSL) we propose a new compositional semantics for DD structures. The analysis shows that the distributive reduplication in CSL can be understood as a realization of the most general distributivity operator (Schwarzschild’s Part with the cover domain), like Champolion’s (2012) D but being anaphoric to the distributive key. The multiple DD marking is not a syntactic agreement, as proposed in some previous approaches but non-scopal anaphoric D operator. Both individual and occasional readings were attested. We suggest that the interpretation of both reduplications leads to the occasional reading; the vacuous/redundant distributivity over the same theta-role results in an individual distributive reading.

Links

• CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/16_015/0002418, interní kód MU: Name: Masarykova univerzita 4.0 (Acronym: MUNI 4.0)

Investor: Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the CR, Priority axis 2: Development of universities and human resources for research and development