Habituals in Sign Language of the Netherlands: A corpus-based study

Abstract

In this corpus-based study on habituals in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), we investigate the manual and non-manual marking of habituality in naturalistic data. We show that both reduplication of the predicate and adverbials with a habitual flavor are used in habitual contexts, but both of these manual markers appear to be optional. As for non-manual markers, even more variation is attested; left-to-right head and body movements and narrowed eyes are the most frequently occurring non-manuals in habitual contexts but are by no means obligatory. The findings contrast with the results reported in two previous studies on habituals in NGT (Hoiting & Slobin 2001; Oomen 2016), which can be partially explained by the fact that these studies used elicitation methods. As such, the present study underscores the importance of using a combination of different methods in investigating linguistic phenomena.