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Syntactic functions of non-manuals in Russian Sign Language
This chapter presents the Russian Sign Language (RSL) Corpus and demonstrates
its capabilities as a research tool by summarizing three corpus-based
studies primarily focused on syntactic functions of nonmanual markers.
The first study considers question marking in regular wh-questions and in
question-answer pairs. It shows that the two constructions have very different
nonmanual markers. The second study analyzes marking of topics in RSL, and
shows that nonmanual markers of topics are typologically common, but are infrequent
in naturalistic corpus data. The third study investigates conditional and
concessive constructions in RSL. It demonstrates that these constructions make
extensive and frequent use of nonmanual markers, but that no single marker is
specialized for the function of expressing conditional or concessive meaning.
Instead, complex combinations of multiple markers are employed in these constructions.
All three studies also contribute to sign language typology by providing
novel descriptions of syntactic and discourse phenomena in RSL.