Marianthi Koraka

RTG PhD student, member since 2021

Project "Imperatives and imperative speech acts across modalities"

As a researcher, I am interested in sign languages and I hold a special interest in the aspect of modality effects. In my PhD project, I investigate imperative speech acts in Greek Sign Language (GSL) and German Sign Language (DGS) by using elicitation and judgement tasks. Imperatives and imperative speech acts in Sign Languages (SLs) is a rather understudied topic, especially when compared to declaratives and interrogatives. Through my project I would like to discover which strategies -morphosyntactic and prosodic- are employed in sign languages for the articulation of imperative speech acts and define the contribution of particular manual and non-manual elements. One major goal of my research is to find whether sign languages possess a particular sentence type for the expression of directive constructions, similar to the one we call "Imperative" in spoken languages, and how it can be defined by applying specific diagnostics.

Supervisors : Nivedita Mani , Markus Steinbach


Research profile

I hold a bachelor degree in Greek Philology and a Master's degree in Linguistics from University of Ioannina, Greece. In my master thesis, I explored word order in GSL in simple declarative sentences and in wh-questions. During my master studies, I spent three months at Pompeu Fabra University as a visiting student, where I worked within the European SIGN-HUB project (Horizon 2020).