A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

Declaratives are used to describe something, share announcements or information, and to make a statement. It is the most unmarked sentence type, thus, there are no specific manual or non-manual markers for declaratives. An important characteristic of sentences is their word order. Two word orders (sign orders) are attested for declaratives in NGT: subject – verb – object (SVO, see Example X.a and Video X.a) and subject – object – verb (SVO, see Example X.b and Video X.b):

                                      hs

a.        marijke buy book

            ‘Marijke buys a book.’ (illustrated in Video X.a)

                       re

b.         marijke cappuccino drink

            ‘Marijke drinks a cappuccino.’ (illustrated in Video X.b)

I will come back to word order in subsequent sections, when the word order of other types is compared to the order of a declarative sentence.

Declaratives can be simple – as is true for the two examples above – or complex. In the latter case, constructions involving coordination or embedding are meant; these topics are addressed in Chapter 3. Another distinction can be made between affirmative (or positive) sentences, and negative sentences. An affirmative expresses the validity or truth of a statement, as in the examples above, while a negative expresses its falsity. Section 1.5 is dedicated to negatives.