Question-answer pairs in Russian Sign Language: a corpus study

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We describe basic morphosyntactic and semantic properties of question-answer pairs (QAPs) collected from the online corpus of Russian Sign Language (RSL). We identified two classes of QAPs: classical and discourse QAPs, which are different in the semantic relation between the question and answer parts. We discovered that non-manual marking and word order in both types of QAPs are different from other constructions involving wh-signs, namely regular questions and free relative clauses. Guided by the similarity between non-manual marking of QAPs and role shift marking, we hypothesize on a possible grammaticalization process connecting the two constructions.