Agentivity of semantic classifiers in Russian Sign Language
DOI:10.30842/alp2306573714219
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
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