Interfaces: The Relation between Structure and Output

This paper is concerned with the interpretation of discourse categories in spoken and signed languages. Based on recent works showing that Focus and Topic constituents are realized in dedicated projections in the C-domain and associated with specific tonal events (Frascarelli 2004a, Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007), this paper discusses evidence (mainly from Aarons 2004) that a systematic connection of the same kind can be maintained in signed languages as well. The analysis of data will show that facial expressions qualify as the formal correlates of intonation insofar as specific non-manual markings signal different discourse categories, which are encoded in a syntactic hierarchy. A comparative analysis of spoken and signed languages can therefore shed additional light on the relation between structure and output.