The Language of Silence: Observations Concerning Turkish Sign Language

Demir S.

BILIG, sa.54, ss.1-20, 2010 (SSCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Basım Tarihi: 2010
  • Dergi Adı: BILIG
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM)
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-20
  • Hacettepe Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

Turkish Sign Language is the native language of the deaf community living in Turkey. Having its own grammar, grammaticalizing units and linguistic devices, Turkish Sign Language presents challenging linguistic features related to grammaticalization, linguistic contact, iconism etc., and it deserves attention due to the scarcity of existing research in this area. Turkish Sign Language is a communication system including all kinds of phenomena a natural language can have, such as semantic graduation, regional dialects, and linguistic change. This article aims to share some observations on Turkish Sign Language and to present this challenging language and its general features to those interested in it. In this study the phonological, syntactic, semantic features and other attributive characteristics of Turkish Sign Language will be discussed under a variety of main titles in order to provide a general opinion on the topic.