Coordination in Catalan sign language: a syntactic account for conjunction

Coordination is a syntactic structure that is attested and productive in both spoken and signed languages. In sign languages, this structure is primarily expressed asyndetically, that is not using manual markers, but rather non-manual ones (NMMs), such as body and head turns, to mark the conjuncts. This paper aims to describe the expression of coordination in Catalan Sign Language (LSC), focusing on TP conjunction, and present the main tests used to identify this type of structure. Building on the analyses proposed until now for spoken languages, the objective is to provide a syntactic analysis for conjunction in LSC. Considerations on the directionality of the structure will contribute to explaining some of the properties of coordination in LSC such as the ungrammaticality of both Across the-Board (ATB) extraction and wide scope of negation. Moreover, the adoption of Coordination Phrase (CoP) as the syntactic category for coordination provides a structure that can also be extended to other types of coordination, such as disjunctive and adversative.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness “ClauseCombi2" FFI2012-36238, BES2013062848, “GramRefLSC FFI2015-68594-P, Govern de la Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR 698) and SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693349