Structure of simple declarative clauses in South African Sign Language

Abstract This paper presents the first corpus-driven linguistic description of South African Sign Language (SASL) and the first exploration of the structure of simple declarative clauses in SASL. Using a corpus of 40 narratives of 25 signers from three South African provinces, the study finds that SASL exhibits a basic SVO clause structure, but that the most common clause structure is SV. The study also presents evidence of the existence of the null copula in SASL, and finds that SASL exhibits a high tolerance for argument ellipsis. With the exception of their generalisations in terms of locative clauses, the study finds that Napoli and Sutton-Spence’s (2014) generalisations regarding sign language syntax hold true for naturalistic narrative discourse in SASL. Finally, the study supports the claim that SASL is a single sign language in terms of its syntactic patterns, despite regional lexical variation.