The Pragmatics of Person and Imperatives in Sign Language of the Netherlands

Abstract

We present new evidence against a grammatical distinction between second and third person in Sign Language of The Netherlands (NGT). More precisely, we show how pushing this distinction into the domain of pragmatics helps account for an otherwise puzzling fact about the NGT imperative: not only is it used to command your addressee, it can also express ‘non-addressee-oriented commands’.