A descriptive grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands

Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT) is a minority language in the Netherlands, but has only recently gained legal recognition of this status. It is estimated that 60,000 people in the Netherlands sign NGT, of whom 10,000 are early onset deaf signers. This book is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of NGT. It offers a detailed description of its phonology, morphology, and selected aspects of its syntax. Whenever possible, the linguistic phenomena are illustrated by naturalistic corpus data. The grammatical description is complemented by a brief overview of the socio-historical background of NGT and of the Dutch sign language community. The European SIGN-HUB project, of which this dissertation is a result, hosts a platform where a digital version of this grammar can be found, along with video fragments providing illustrations of many of the linguistic characteristics addressed in the book: www.sign-hub.eu/grammar. This resource may be used for cross-linguistic research, for the development of NGT acquisition materials, and as a reference work