Paucal pronouns in Catalan Sign Language a typological rarity?

The morphological strategies used to express numerosity in the visual modality have been investigated for a number of sign languages. However, the meaning associated with these operations remains unexplored in many sign languages. This article investigates the properties of reduplication with movement in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) personal pronouns, presenting findings obtained through elicitation with two native signers. In contrast to previous descriptions, this study makes a case for a paucal analysis of reduplication with movement. The proposal is grounded on different, but interconnected, pieces of evidence. First, like paucal markers, pronouns reduplicated with movement have an upper bound cutoff. Second, they do not require the entities in the context to be exhausted, and their interpretation is analogous to that of the partitive reading of the paucal quantifier some (i.e., they are nonexhaustive). Finally, they do not enforce the reading that the members of the set referred to by the pronoun are picked out separately (i.e., they are nondistributive). The results of this study highlight the need for more detailed investigations into the interpretation of number morphemes in sign languages and suggest that the array of number values taken to be distinguished in sign language personal pronouns might be more varied than what is frequently assumed.