Cross-linguistic research of Flemish Sign Language (VGT) and South African Sign Language (SASL) Constituent order

University of the Free StateThis paper reports on a comparison of word order issues, and more specifically on the order of the verb and its arguments, in two unrelated sign languages: South African Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language. The study comprises the first part of a larger project in which a number of grammatical mechanisms and structures are compared across the two sign languages, using a corpus consisting of similar VGT and SASL-data of a various nature. The overall goal of the project is to contribute to a further understanding of the issue of the degree of similarity across unrelated sign languages. However, the different studies also mean a further exploration of the grammars of the two languages involved. In this paper the focus is on the analysis of isolated declarative sentences elicited by means of pictures. The results yield some interesting similarities across all sign-ers but also indicate that — especially with regard to constituent order — there are important differences between the two languages.Keywords: South African Sign Language, Flemish Sign Language, similarity across sign languages, constituent order, cross-linguistic comparison, morpho-syntax1. IntroductionWhereas the first cross-linguistic sign language studies mainly focused on a com-parison of the lexicon and showed that there are many differences across sign languages (e.g. Woll 1984), subsequent comparison of aspects of the grammar