ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies
ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies 

Agentivity of semantic classifiers in Russian Sign Language

DOI:10.30842/alp2306573714219
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Khristoforova Ye. A. Agentivnost semanticheskikh klassifikatorov v russkom zhestovom yazyke. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 468.
Semantic classifiers in sign languages is one of the types of classifiers. These elements indicate their referents, by referring them to a certain class of entities (class of humans, animals, etc.). Among eleven semantic classifiers observed for Russian Sign Language [Khristoforova 2016] three can refer to animated entities. According to corpus data, it is possible to use several different semantic classifiers to encode the same animated referent. We hypothesized that the choice between these three classifiers might be motivated by a particular sematic role of the referent. The paper presents the analysis of sematic roles of the animated referents in the corpus aimed to examine this hypothesis. We came to the conclusion that all three classifiers can refer to Agent, but only one of them is always restricted to an animate referent.
Keywords
sign languages, Russian Sign Language, classifiers, semantic classifiers, Agent, Theme, classifier predicates
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Keywords
sign languages, Russian Sign Language, classifiers, semantic classifiers, Agent, Theme, classifier predicates
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