Focus and contrast in catalan sign language (lSC): form and interpretation

• Autores: Alexandra Navarrete González
• Directores de la Tesis: Gemma Barberà (dir. tes.), Josep Quer (codir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2022
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Carlo Cecchetto (presid.), Laia Mayol (secret.), Vadim Kimmelman (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Traducción y Ciencias del Lenguaje por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
• Materias:
  • Lingüística
    • Teoría lingüística
    • Lingüística sincrónica
      • Semántica
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
• Resumen

  • This thesis provides a description and a pragmatic analysis of the expression and interpretation of focus and contrast in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). I argue that LSC data provides empirical evidence that contrast is an independent notion in Information Structure that can overlap with topics and foci, and that involves different types, which are built compositionally. All types of contrast share a basic meaning (semantic parallelism), which is essential for an element to be contrastive, and which is expressed through a specific combination of non-manual markers (NMMs). Additional prosodic NMMs are used to trigger more complex meanings, like exhaustivity or counterexpectation. Moreover, a first description of focus particles and clefts in LSC is provided, together with a pragmatic analysis of exhaustivity and non-truth conditional meaning (presuppositions and implicatures) in these constructions.