On Case system in Georgian Sign Language

Abstract

Georgian Sign Language (GESL is a language of Deaf and Hard of Hearing people (DHH) in Georgia. As a language of former Soviet space, it still has a considerable influence from Russian Sign Language (RSL), especially on its lexical level. Usually, sign languages (SL) do not have case marking. One of the few studies that claim the existence of case marking in SL is Meir (2003), who argues that Israeli Sign Language (ISL) features a case marking pronoun, which is grammaticalized from the sign person — the regular index pronoun directed in space at either the signer/addressee or a location in space. Meir found that there are several relevant differences between the signs PERSON and the case-marked pronoun labeled PRO[bC].  Meir (2003) considers, that ‘ISL agreement verbs is a manifestation of the dative case’. She outlines, that ‘marking case distinctions on the verb is very different from the more usual mechanism of case-marking in spoken languages, namely, by marking the nominal arguments’.  Makharoblidze (2012, 2015) and Börstell (2015, 2016, 2017) had trials to describe case marking in SL. The descriptive investigations of Georgian Sign Language - GESL reveal that this sign language is crucially different in this respect, as it has a rich system of case marking. I argue that there are fice cases in GESL - nominative, ergative, dative, genitive and vocative, and they are used only for human class nouns. Nominative case is zero-marked. The other four markers are depicted in Table 1. In GESL case markers do not move in space in difference from the same type markers of other categories.