A Grammar of Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

Simultaneous compounds are two handed: one hand articulates one part of one stem and the other hand simultaneously articulates part of the other stem. The following examples illustrate it.

a)      help(h2)^assist(h1) (‘support’)

b)      sun(h2)^beam(h1) (‘sunbeam’)

(extracted from DOMAD, 2002b)

As we can see in the examples, the stems of simultaneous compounds can be formed in two different ways. First, they may be reduced forms of signs, like example (a). The signs help and assist are two-handed words but are signed as one-handed at the same time. Second, the constituents of the compound are one-handed and can be signed at the same time with the non-dominant hand, like (b). The non-dominant hand articulates sun and the dominant hand beam.

An additional type of simultaneous compounding is numeral incorporation, which involves a numeral and a time unit term, a verb or a pronoun [SYNTAX 4.3.4]. The base of this structure is the lexical sign or the pronoun, which modify the selection of the fingers (the numeral sign), as exemplified below.

a)      two^weeks (‘two weeks’)

b)      three^miss (‘three are missing’)

c)      four^ix_1pl (`the four of us’)

The examples illustrate a numeral incorporation within a time unit term, ‘week’ (a), a verb, ‘miss’ (b), and the second person plural pronoun, ‘us’ (c).