PART 4 Morphology
Morphemes are the meaningful components of signs. A sign may consist of a single morpheme (simplex sign) or of more than one morpheme (complex sign). Thus, morphemes are the crucial constituents in word formation processes. The morpheme(s) that make(s) up a sign can have lexical or grammatical functions, and they can be articulated manually or non-manually. The morphology of a sign language is described in terms of the properties of the different types of its morphemes and of the word formation processes.
This part of the grammar is organized into five chapters. The first two chapters focus on two major word/sign formation processes: compounding and derivation. The third and the fourth chapters describe the two major inflectional processes, namely verbal inflection (agreement, tense, aspect, modality, and negation) and nominal inflection (number marking, localization, and distribution). The last chapter is devoted to the description of the morphological category classifiers, which denote entities by depicting some salient aspects of these entities as handshape morphemes and obligatorily combine with verbal roots to form stems.