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Role shift is the widespread phenomenon in sign languages whereby a signer reports utterances, thoughts or actions of a character in another context by resorting to a possibly very rich array of nonmanual markers that imitatively depict the agent in that context. Such markers can include changes in eye gaze direction, facial expression, head and body position, and are mostly articulated simultaneously with manual signing. The stretches of signing marked with such nonmanual cues are interpreted by default with displaced reference to the derived context being reported. The literature that has undertaken a formal analysis of role shift has mostly focused on its use as a means to encode reported discourse, and it has addressed the question whether role shift is marking a direct quotation only or it encodes indirect reports as well. In this line of work, its use to report someone else's actions has been often put aside, despite the fact that in spontaneous discourse both uses occur intertwined with one another. ; The research in this paper was partly made possible thanks to the grants awarded to the author by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68 594-P), by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478) and by the European Commission (SIGN-HUB H2020 project 693 349).

This contribution has been made possible thanks to the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, as well as to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), and to the Government of the Generalitat de CatalunyaAGAUR (2017 SGR 1478).

From the very early stages of sign language research (Klima & Bellugi, 1979 for ASL) and in subsequent descriptions of unrelated sign languages, a reduplicative morpheme in verbal morphology has been identified as encoding exhaustive distribution over a plural argument in agreement verbs. It consists in a sideward reduplication of the verb sign on the horizontal plane, where the repeated endpoints match the referential locus of a plural argument. It is often labelled as [+distributive/exhaustive] and considered a mark of plural argument agreement. However, in Klima & Bellugi (1979, p. 284) it was called "distributional aspect", highlighting the link to inflectional aspectual properties. On the basis of Catalan Sign Language (LSC) data, this paper reconsiders the status of the alleged [+distributive/exhaustive] morpheme under the light of verbal plurality marking and argues for a broader analysis of reduplication in the verbal domain built on the category of pluractionality, in line with Kuhn & Aristodemo (2017). This change in vantage point allows for a better understanding of reduplication in sign languages as a grammatical marker of plurality cutting across the parameters of event participants, event times and event locations. ; This contribution has been made possible thanks to the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, as well as by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), and by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478).

We present an analysis of subjunctive complements in Griko, a Modern Greek dialect spoken in Southern Italy. Despite the obvious similarities with the properties of subjunctive clauses in Standard Modern Greek (SMG), introduced by na in both varieties, we capitalize on the contrasting distribution of verbal forms in each case: while in SMG all temporal-aspectual combinations are allowed in na-clauses and no specific subjunctive morphology is used, Griko only features perfective non-past in the same context. This fact is argued to instantiate the specialization of aspectual morphology in Griko for the marking of subjunctive on the verb. We propose that the morphological marking of subjunctive that had been lost in earlier stages of the diachronic development of Greek re-entered Griko as a result of contact with Salentino, the southern Romance variety spoken in the same area, which also exhibits mood concord between a subjunctive complementizer and dedicated subjunctive morphology on the verb. Although the realization of subjunctive in Griko and in SMG appears to be an instance of microvariation in the syntax (mood concord in the former, no mood concord in the latter), we argue that it ultimately reduces to the feature specification of particular elements, namely inflectional morphemes. ; The project has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation, whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Josep Quer's contribution to this research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO, FFI2012-36238), and by the Government of Catalonia (2014 SGR 698).

Natural languages come in two different modalities. The impact of modality on the grammatical structure and linguistic theory has been discussed at great length in the last 20 years. By contrast, the impact of modality on linguistic data elicitation and collection, corpus studies, and experimental (psycholinguistic) studies is still underinvestigated. In this article, we address specific challenges that arise in judgment data elicitation and experimental studies of sign languages. These challenges are related to the socio-linguistic status of the Deaf community and the larger variability across signers within the same community, to the social status of sign languages, to properties of the visual-gestural modality and its interface with gesture, to methodological aspects of handling sign language data, and to specific linguistic features of sign languages. While some of these challenges also pertain to (some varieties of) spoken languages, other challenges are more modality-specific. The special combination of the challenges discussed in this article seems to be a specific facet empirical research on sign languages is faced with. In addition, we discuss the complementarity of theoretical approaches and experimental studies and show how the interaction of both approaches contributes to a better understanding of sign languages in particular and linguistic structures in general. ; This contribution has been made possible, thanks to the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 693349. JQ contribution is also made possible by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P) and by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478). MS contribution is made possible by the German Science foundation (DFG-AZ: STE 958/8-1).

This paper examines backgrounding strategies for human agents in Catalan Sign Language, that is, constructions featuring human agents that are non-referential. We identify and analyze four types of agent-backgrounding strategies: subjectless constructions, indefinite pronouns, the impersonal axis, and general nouns. Extending on previous work, we offer a description and a semantico-pragmatic analysis of each construction. ; This work was partly supported by the Franco-German ANR-DFG project 'Towards a typology of human impersonal pronoun' (ANR-11-FRAL-0011, 2012-15); the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P); and the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 01478).

This paper investigates whether the semantic and phonological levels in speech production are specific to spoken languages or universal across modalities. We examined semantic and phonological effects during Catalan Signed Language (LSC: Llengua de Signes Catalana) production using an adaptation of the picture–word interference task: native and non-native signers were asked to sign picture names while ignoring signs produced in the background. The results showed semantic interference effects for semantically related distractor signs and phonological facilitation effects when target signs and distractor signs shared either Handshape or Movement but phonological interference effects when target and distractor shared Location. The results suggest that the general distinction between semantic and phonological levels seems to hold across modalities. However, differences in sign language and spoken production become evident in the mechanisms underlying phonological encoding, shown by the different role that Location, Handshape, and Movement play during phonological encoding in sign language. ; This research has been partially supported by Grants SEJ2004-07680-C02-02/PSIC and SEJ2006-09238/PSIC from the Spanish Government. We thank all the deaf volunteers and the deaf associations CERECUSOR and CASAL DE SORDS DE BARCELONA (with special thanks to Javi Vidal, who signed the stimuli for the experiment, Santiago Frigola and Delfina Aliaga). We also thank Bencie Woll, Margaret Gillon Dowens, Ansgar Hantsch and the UCSD journal club for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

This paper investigates the morpho-phonological differences between the members of related noun-verb pairs in Catalan Sign Language. Like parallel investigations in other sign languages, our experimental work provides evidence that the major differentiating factors between related nouns and verbs materialize in the movement component of signs and non-manual markers, thus providing empirical support to the hypothesis that most of noun-verb pairs have different morpho-phonological properties. We distinguish different types of movements, which we categorize into four regular morphological subgroups. We also take into account a fifth group that shows no apparent movement distinction. Concerning non-manual markers, we provide empirical evidence that nouns are mostly produced simultaneously with mouthing, in contrast to verbs, which in a smaller proportion are produced mainly with mouth gestures. Crucially, the fifth group presents the largest ratio of mouthing for nouns and even for verbs. We address these findings within an exo-skeletal theoretical syntactic approach (Borer 2005a,b, 2013, 2014). ; We acknowledge the financial support for our research. M.Teresa Espinal's contribution has been made possible by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2017-82547-P) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR634), as well as by an ICREA Academia fellowship. Josep Quer's contribution has been made possible by the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), and the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR1478).

In this contribution we review and assess the specificities of vitality and revitalization of sign languages in a context of atypical endangerment. The contribution focuses on concrete examples of revitalization measures, both implemented and not yet implemented, based on the Catalan Sign Language (LSC) community context, such as the important role of language documentation, the reasons of the precarious situation in education and a proposal to establish an inclusive educational model, and finally the potential of an open learning resource offering greater access to sign language education. ; This contribution has been possible thanks to the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, 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), to Obra Social La Caixa (LSC Corpus, Institut d'Estudis Catalans), and to AGAUR-Govern de la Generalitat de Catalunya (MOOC funding: Resolució ECO/1247/2014, de 29 de maig).