Give signs – make happy Metaphorical extension and grammaticalization of GIVE in Sign Language of the Netherlands

The transfer verb ‘give’ has been shown to be subject to metaphorical extension and – in a second step – grammaticalization in many unrelated languages. As for the former process, we observe extension to abstract transfer (e.g., ‘give responsibility/pleasure’); as for the latter, ‘give’ may grammaticalize into, for instance, a benefactive or causative marker (e.g., Kuteva et al. 2019). The mechanisms underlying these diachronic changes appear to be modality-independent, as similar processes have been identified in various sign languages.
In the present study, we offer the first comprehensive overview of various uses of ‘give’ in a single sign language, Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), based entirely on naturalistic corpus data. A search of the Corpus NGT yielded 131 tokens of GEVEN (‘give’). Analysis of these tokens reveals that less than a third of them actually expresses concrete transfer, while the remaining tokens express abstract transfer of various types (e.g., ‘give chance’, ‘give name’), including grammatical meanings like change of state/causation (e.g., ‘give happy’). We discuss our findings from a cross-modal and intra-modal typological perspective, offering also speculations about a possible grammaticalization path.