Banca de DEFESA: LAYSE DA COSTA SANTOS

MODAL MARKERS IN BRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE: a descriptive study of the semantics of possible worlds

Modality; Libras; Semantics.

This work aims to describe modal marks, specifically the notions of possibility and necessity in which deaf signers of Libras perform and the situational contexts in which they present themselves. In this way, we use a theoretical foundation that has as its framework the modality within the semantics of possible worlds, Kratzer's main theory (1981, 1991, 2008 and 2010). We start with the guiding question: how is the phenomenon of modality encoded in Brazilian Sign Language – Libras considering the production conditions and the particularities of this visual-spatial modality language? To this end, we used the contextualized elicitation methodology described by Matthewson (2004) and Sanchez-Mendes (2014). The research corpus included bilingual deaf people belonging to the academic community of the Federal University of Pernambuco, with 6 participants including teachers and students. We present 6 questions with situational contexts aiming to obtain results using possibility and necessity modals that were recorded and described through glosses. As a result, we observed that, just like oral languages, Libras has its modal strength marked by the lexicon. ‘POSSIBLE’ and ‘NEED’ present themselves as the signs used by the deaf that encode possible worlds in a variable way into epistemic and circumstantial/root. As we were able to observe in the findings the duplication of hands and non-manual marks seem to be an important factor for the modal basis of Libras. Circumstantial necessity modals double the number of hands to get closer to universal possible worlds.