Chapter 8. Studying microdiachronic change with the Catalan Sign Language corpus

The Catalan Sign Language (LSC) corpus of the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which is under development, includes annotated data from three different age groups of signers, and allows for the study of microdiachronic change, namely language change across generations. In this chapter, we focus on the differences observed in the use of referential expressions in anaphoric chains, by comparing the three age groups of signers as a window into the mechanisms of grammatical change in the visual-spatial modality. Specifically, classifiers and role-shift constitute the most common referential expressions for anaphoric links in maintenance contexts for all age groups, while bare nouns are the most common in reintroduction contexts, especially in terms of the younger generation.