26/11/24 - Lorena Figueiredo (University of Bergen)

Reciprocal constructions in Brazilian Sign Language: exploring lexical and grammatical strategies

A reciprocal construction, by definition, “denotes an eventuality that involves reciprocity between its participants” and reciprocal verbs usually bear a specific morphological marking (Siloni, 2008, p.452). In this presentation, we aim at describing the strategies employed by Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) to express reciprocity, whether they are lexical or grammatical. While reciprocal constructions have been studied in various signed languages (Fischer & Gough, 1978; Pfau & Steinbach, 2003; Zeshan & Panda, 2011; Kubus & Hohenberger, 2013), including Libras (Ferreira, 2021; Pizzio et al., 2023), much of this research emphasizes reciprocalization strategies (i.e., grammatical strategies) over the lexical one. Therefore, in this study we will broaden this debate by describing the lexical strategy for expressing reciprocity in Libras, the use of inherently reciprocal verbs. This group of verbs presents an interesting pattern regarding the number of hands and the type of movement, which reflects semantic properties of the events being represented. Furthermore, we analyzed reciprocal constructions in Libras, extracted from the Corpus Libras (Quadros et al., 2020), in order to identify occurrences with inherently reciprocal verbs and reciprocalized constructions, from which we will describe the reciprocalization strategies in Libras, namely: i) phonological feature copy onto the non-dominant hand; ii) conversion of movement (sequential and simultaneous) and iii) H2 decoupling.