Verbs And Adjectives: Some Morphological Processes in Swedish Language

In one of the major works on American Sign Language it is characterised as an inflecting language, comparable to languages like Latin, Russian and Navajo (Klima & Bellugi, 1979). The possibility of other natural sign languages displaying different typologies is mentioned as well as a suggestion that ‘the modality in which the language develops constrains its natural patterning in one direction rather than another’. (Klima & Bellugi, p. 314.) The data we are beginning to obtain from Swedish Sign Language support the latter suggestion, since many morphological processes described by Klima and Bellugi seem to be present in Swedish Sign Language. The striking similarities between the two languages are particularly…