ABSTRACT
Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL) is an indigenous sign language used in deaf communities in urban centres of the Indian subcontinent. So far there is no evidence that IPSL might be genetically related to any European or North American sign language, and its grammatical structure is significantly different in many respects from the better documented Western sign languages. IPSL is used, with some lexical variation but a uniform grammar, in southern and central Pakistan and in north western India. It is likely that regional varieties o f IPSL are also used in other parts o f the Indian subcontinent, with greater lexical variation in some parts than in others, but the exact geographic extent o f IPSL and the nature o f regional variation have yet to be determined. The data presented here are based on the IPSL variety as used in Karachi and New Delhi. The extensive corpus of data includes texts of various registers: texts based on picture stories, personal narratives, a theatre performance, a signed version o f a short story, a formal address to a deaf club, and lectures from a sign language television program (for details on the data, see Zeshan 2000a, pp. 8-12; 2000b, p. 27f). However, grammaticality judgments for constructions not occurring in the data have not been elicited.1
