摘要：This article reports on the results of a pilot study on aspect marking in SignLanguage of the Netherlands (NGT). A deaf signer of NGT completed an adaptedversion of a questionnaire about tense, mood, and aspect marking in spokenlanguages (Dahl 1985). The resulting data provide the basis for a description ofthe manual and non-manual markers that signal continuative and habitual aspectin NGT. The results show that the main marker of the two aspectual distinctions isreduplication of the verb, accompanied by synchronous back-and-forth(continuative) and left-to-right (habitual) movements of the head and body. Thefindings challenge those reported in a similar study on aspectual marking byHoiting &Slobin (2001) in two respects. Firstly, Hoiting and Slobin argue thatelliptical modulation of a verb’s movement is a distinctive marker of continuativeand habitual aspect, but no such modulation was attested in the data. Secondly,the authors claim that, in cases in which the phonological specifications of a verbblock elliptical modulation, aspect is obligatorily marked sequentially by meansof the aspectual particle DOOR (‘through’). However, since there was no ellipticalmodulation in the data, DOOR was also not attested. The results could pointtoward grammatical differences between different variants of NGT
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