The marking of polar interrogatives in Catalan Sign Language: A first attempt to solve the puzzle

Polar interrogatives in Catalan Sign Language (LSC) are obligatorily marked with a specific combination of nonmanual marking features and optionally marked with a question particle. Given that, at least, the eyebrow position feature does not remain constant, LSC shows different combinations of nonmanuals to mark this structure. Data points towards an analysis in which each combination of nonmanuals conveys a different bias and a novel feature-based description system would explain and predict that. Therefore, each combination of nonmanuals, as well as the appearance of the question particle, is shown to not only mark sentence type but also to encode pragmatic meaning.