Possibility modals in Brazilian Sign Language and Argentine Sign Language: A contrastive study

Abstract

Despite the broadness of the field of modality, van der Auwera & Plungian (1998) restricted it to the semantic notions of necessity and possibility. For their analysis the authors developed semantic maps, which represent these notions in terms of semantic categories hierarchically organized. Precisely, in van der Auwera & Plungian’s framework both necessity and possibility modalities are divided into two categories: epistemic and non-epistemic, which, in turn, are subdivided into two subcategories: participant-internal and participant-external. The participant-external subcategory is also subdivided into two others: deontic and non-deontic. Thus, the framework offers a principled means to analyze the strategies languages have to express the different meanings each modality domain comprehends, for example, the use of different lexical items or polysemy. Although this framework was initially proposed for and applied to the analysis of modality in spoken languages, it has already been used in the analysis of modality in signed languages such as ASL (Shaffer 2000, 2002; Wilcox & Shaffer 2006) and Brazilian Sign Language, Libras, (Xavier & Wilcox 2014). These studies have revealed the existence of separate lexical signs to express one or some of the meanings distinguished by van der Auwera & Plungian in their semantic maps, as well as the existence of polysemous modal signs. This chapter offers a contrastive study of the expression of possibility modality in two historically unrelated and linguistically understudied signed languages, namely, Libras and Argentine Sign Language, LSA. To do so, we adapted Xavier & Wicox (2014) semistructured interview created on the basis of van der Auwera and Plungian’s possibility semantic map and elicited possibility modals from two fluent signers for each language. With this, we aim to contrast Libras’s and LSA’s strategies to express the different meanings comprehended within the possibility modality domain. This will include not only the use of different lexical signs or polysemy, but also other resources such as manner of movement and nonmanuals.