Abstract: 

Two studies on polar questions in Dutch Sign Language

This study investigates polar questions in Dutch Sign Language (NGT). We aim to identify the different polar question forms in NGT and the contexts in which they are used.

A recent production experiment has shown that in NGT, polar question forms vary with bias (Oomen et al., forthcoming). The present study adds two types of data to the picture: naturalistic corpus data and data from a perception experiment. I present results on sentence structures and non-manual markers, and show that polar question forms in NGT vary depending on the context of use. For instance, signers appear to use contextual evidence and prior speaker belief to predict the interlocutor’s answer and adapt their polar questions to ensure agreement and avoid misalignment. Finally, I briefly discuss how we translated our linguistic research insights into practice by integrating our findings into a one-day training session for sign language interpreters.