The notion of focus and its relation to contrast in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

In this paper, we describe the different syntactic and prosodic manual and non-manual markers used in the expression of focus and contrast in LSC. Given that in LSC contrast markers may also be found in topics, we follow Vallduví & Vilkuna (1998) and analyse the notion of contrast as a different dimension, which may also overlap with topics, and we offer an analysis of the expression of contrast in LSC from a unifying semantic-pragmatic perspective. Moreover, following Umbach (2004), we identify three different subtypes of contrast expressed through different combinations of markers.This is part of my PhD research, which is possible thanks to the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693349. This research has also been partially possible thanks to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), to the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR 698)