Relative clauses in German Sign Language: Extraposition and reconstruction

Relative clause constructions are known to show considerable variation across languages (Keenan 1985; Lehmann 1986). However, as is commonly the case, the available typological investigations only consider spoken languages. In this paper, we will focus on relative clauses in German Sign Language (DGS) and compare them to the patterns of relativization described for spoken languages as well as for other sign languages. It will turn out that similar variation is attested across sign languages. For DGS, we will claim that it has externally headed postnominal relative clauses and that it makes use of sentence-initial relative pronouns. Moreover, we will show that DGS corresponds to German in that relative clauses in both languages may appear in situ, may be fronted, or extraposed. Extraposition, however, is less constrained than in German, since the highly specific relative pronouns allow for unambiguous reconstruction of the relative clause. This paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we briefly introduce the relevant typological aspects of relative clauses in spoken languages. Section 3 gives an overview of relative clause constructions in three signed languages. Section 4 turns to relative clauses in DGS. The internal structure of DGS relative clauses is discussed in section 4.1 while section 4.2 deals with extraposition and reconstruction of relative clauses in DGS and German. The main findings of our paper are summarized in section 5. 2