Negation markers in Polish Sign Language (PJM)

What is it about?

This paper is a summary of my PhD thesis. My main aim is to explain how negation works in Polish Sign Language (PJM), an understudied, natural, visual-spatial language used in every day communication by the Deaf in Poland. For this purpose I designed and carried out an original, entirely corpus-based study, which I describe in detail in the paper.

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Photo by Jo Hilton on Unsplash

Photo by Jo Hilton on Unsplash

Why is it important?

My study broadens our knowledge about PJM grammar, which was not yet studied in detail. We are still lacking thorough descriptions of different language phenomena in PJM and my thesis aims at filling this gap. It describes an original study of different mechanisms of expressing negation in PJM. It is an entirely corpus-based study, which helps to avoid the difficulties that typological studies face (such as an insufficient research sample that fails to contain all variants of the analyzed phenomena).