Conditional clauses in German Sign Language (DGS) and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) An empirical sociolinguistic study

The aim of this dissertation is a sociolinguistic empirical study of conditional sentences in two non-related sign languages, DGS (Deutsche Gebärdensprache; German Sign Language) and Libras (Língua Brasileira de Sinais; Brazilian Sign Language). The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part deals with aspects from Deaf Studies in the two countries and their Deaf Communities. There, language and political history, current politics, education, socio-economics and geography of the respective Deaf Community are presented. In the second part, the linguistic part, conditional sentences in both language modalities, auditory-oral and visual-manual, are discussed and examples are presented from different spoken and signed languages. The research design of the comparison of DGS and Libras, the results of the comparison and a concluding discussion are also presented in this part of the thesis. The first part of the thesis provides a basis for the second part in offering explanations for the linguistic phenomena under investigation from the perspective of socio-political and socio-economic aspects of the two Deaf Communities. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.