Morphological Properties of Mouthings in Hungarian Sign Language (MJNY) : A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This dissertation presents the first systematic, empirical investigation of the morphological properties of mouthings in Hungarian Sign Language (MJNY). MJNY, unlike other European sign languages, borrows mouth forms from the surrounding spoken language, Hungarian, which is a Finno-Ugric language with rich inflectional morphology (Kiefer 2000). Based upon informal observations, native signers of MJNY make use of these spoken inflections in mouthings (Rácz 2010a). This doctoral project examines which inflectional categories are exhibited in mouthings. An MJNY video collection of interviews with Hungarian Deaf signers served as the source of the empirical data. I investigated the production of five participants (110 minutes of raw material) in order to find MJNY utterances with potential inflections in mouthings. Transcription was carried out with the annotation tool iLex (Hanke & Storz 2010). Mouthing forms were annotated as spoken Hungarian words. The data analysis shows that the main inflectional categories used by the signers are Person and Number on verbs and nouns; other relevant categories are Case and nominal Number. These findings are interpreted in a language contact framework. The term cross- modal code-mixing is used to refer to mouthings, emphasising that it is a specific language contact phenomenon not described in spoken languages. The dissertation closes with a discussion on a bilingual approach which describes mouthings with Hungarian inflection as a natural part of the dynamic bilingual linguistic repertoire of Hungarian signers. This language production provides a unique window to understand the bilingualism of Deaf signers in Hungary.