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Another way to mark syntactic dependencies: The case for right-peripheral specifiers in sign languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Carlo Cecchetto,
Carlo Geraci and
Sandro Zucchi
Carlo Cecchetto*
Affiliation:
University of Milan–Bicocca
Carlo Geraci*
Affiliation:
University of Milan–Bicocca
Sandro Zucchi*
Affiliation:
University of Milan
*
Cecchetto, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Milano–Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milano, Italy [carlo.cecchetto@unimib.itl]
[carlo.geraci@unimib.it]
[alessandro.zucchi@unimi.it]
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Abstract

The occurrence of WH-items at the right edge of the sentence, while extremely rare in spoken languages, is quite common in sign languages. In particular, in sign languages like LIS (Italian Sign Language) WH-items cannot be positioned at the left edge. We argue that existing accounts of right-peripheral occurrences of WH-items are empirically inadequate and provide no clue as to why sign languages and spoken languages differ in this respect. We suggest that the occurrence of WH-items at the right edge of the sentence in sign languages be taken at face value: in these languages, WH-phrases undergo rightward movement. Based on data from LIS, we argue that this is due to the fact that WH-NONMANUAL MARKING (NMM) marks the dependency between an interrogative complementizer and the position that the WH-phrase occupies before it moves. The hypothesis that NMM can play this role also accounts for the spreading of negative NMM with LIS negative quantifiers. We discuss how our analysis can be extended to ASL (American Sign Language) and IPSL (Indo-Pakistani Sign Language). Our account is spelled out in the principles-and-parameters framework. In the last part of the article, we relate our proposal to recent work on prosody in spoken languages showing that WH-dependencies can be prosodically marked in spoken languages. Overt movement and prosodic marking of the WH-dependency do not normally cooccur in spoken languages, while they are possible in sign languages. We propose that this is due to the fact that sign languages, unlike spoken languages, are multidimensional.

Keywords

sign languageItalian Sign Language (LIS)WH-questionsprosodic marking of syntactic dependenciesnegationspecifiers

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , June 2009, pp. 278 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Linguistic Society of America

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