Abstract:

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative code-switches, wherein signers produce a sequence of two signs—one from each language—with the same meaning to label a single referent. We consider several motivations detailed in existing literature on code-switching, before proposing an explanation motivated by the disambiguation of reversible (therefore potentially ambiguous) verb events, primarily by using reiteration to focus agents. We suggest that with this phenomenon, we see signers employ a previously unattested strategy to mark arguments and thereby aid syntactic disambiguation.

摘要：

语言接触的情况通常是手语的常态。本文调查了巴西一个小型农村社区使用的第三代年轻手语 Cena 与巴西国家手语 Libras 之间单模态接触的案例。我们的分析涉及这种接触的一个副产品：重复语码转换，其中手语者产生一系列两个符号——一个来自每种语言——具有相同的含义来标记一个单一的指称对象。我们考虑了现有关于语码转换的文献中详述的几种动机，然后提出一种解释，其动机是消除可逆（因此可能不明确）动词事件的歧义，主要是通过重复来聚焦代理。我们建议，对于这种现象，