Abstract:

Russian Sign Language (RSL) makes use of constructions involving manual simultaneity, in particular, weak hand holds, where one hand is being held in the location and configuration of a sign, while the other simultaneously produces one sign or a sequence of several signs. In this paper, I argue that some weak hand holds can be analyzed using the formalism of External Remerge and Parenthetical Merge (de Vries 2008, 2009). I show that the syntactic structures that produce weak hand holds in RSL are also attested in spoken languages, but that the linearization rules are modality-specific due to the differences in articulators. I also demonstrate that RSL applies distinctive linearizations for External Remerge and Parenthetical Merge, thus overtly expressing the difference between these two operations.

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