Resumen de Question-answer pairs in Russian Sign Language: a corpus study

Evgeniia Khristoforova, Vadim Kimmelman

• We describe basic morphosyntactic and semantic properties of question-answer pairs(QAPs) collected from the online corpus of Russian Sign Language (RSL). We identifiedtwo classes of QAPs: classical and discourse QAPs, which are different in the semantic re-lation between the question and answer parts. We discovered that non-manual markingand word order in both types of QAPs are different from other constructions involvingwh-signs, namely regular questions and free relative clauses. Guided by the similaritybetween non-manual marking of QAPs and role shift marking, we hypothesize on a pos-sible grammaticalization process connecting the two constructions