In sign languages (and ASL specifically) is there a grammatical construct in which there is repetition of a lexical sign or functional feature throughout the sentence to assist in processing. For example, in English you may have the following sentence in which "that" is a functional item that can be reduplicated to remind the interlocutor which clause is being referenced:
"Josh said that after we finsh the final examination in our training module (that) we could go out for ice cream."
Could anyone think of an example?
Dear Joshua,
I am not an expert in sign languages, but reading your question, it reminded me of a phenomenon that we can see in aphasia: the contrast between constructions resolved in narrow syntax vs. those that need narrow + discourse syntax.
According to Avrutin (2000, 2006), the second set entails more processing costs and are problematic in aphasia where you can see examples like:
He made it the castle (as clitic doubling or as right clitic dislocation, in languages where any of these are used).
(He) made it the boy (in languages in which pro-drop is the norm, and hence, the information conveyed by the NP is redundant.
These strategies arise to minimize processing costs, so the intuition was that maybe pronouns and clitics are good places to look for your examples also in sign language.
I hope it helps, but as I said, this is just an intuition.
I am not an expert on ASL either, but know that since it is a visual-spatial language, one can refer to people, places and things repeatedly by positioning them in space and referring to that space again or "becoming" that person - sometimes by subtly changing body orientation. This is an efficient way for the signer to highlight exactly what s/he is referring to. Stokoe (1960) began the important work of identifying ASL as a true complete language with equivalent features of a spoken language. You might go to his work to find what you are seeking. I also found this: Kegl, J. A. (2004). ASL Syntax: Research in progress and proposed research. Sign Language & Linguistics, 7(2), 173-206.
Look for 'doubled constructions', which are present in all sign languages. These constructions have two occurrences of the same element, normally one at the beginning and the other at the end of the sentence.
As for syntactic distance, in Catalan Sign Language, and I am sure in other SLs too, you can have a wh-word at the beginning of the sentence that has moved from an embedded clause (long-distance wh-movement) and another copy at the end. Something like: what john say mary steal what (What did John say that Mary stole?).
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