The Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), as its name suggests, is a language signed by deaf
communities spread throughout the Brazilian territory. The present work, entitled “The
articulation of temporal clauses in Libras", is a descriptive study of the articulation of clauses
in Libras, which is based on data from the language in use and a functionalist approach to
language. More precisely, our objective is to describe the complex sentences when articulated
at the level of temporal adverbial hypotaxis, in which the time of the event present in the
proposition of the dependent clause corresponds to the time of the event present in the main
clause (Neves, 2006; Lima, 2002). and identifying manual signals and non-manual signals that
promote this corpus involves the linguistic analysis of videos from participants – who
previously authorized the use of this material or who made them openly available to the public,
on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others. WhatsApp - and the
National Libras Inventory corpus After analysis, the data was compiled into an Excel
spreadsheet to better categorize the results. In total, we identified 207 temporal adverbial
hypotactical constructions, based on videos of 22 deaf signers. The results indicate four primary
strategies: (1) non-manual, (2) manual, (3) buoy, and (4) juxtaposition. In non-manual
strategies, we identify the articulation between a dependent clause and a matrix clause that
seems to promote a notion of irrealis, that is, a situation or action that is not considered real and
that can promote both a future temporal notion, as well as a notion of conditionality, depending
on the context. This is the suspension strategy together with the mouth ALREADY and the nod
of the head. We also identified the head nod and the use of Mouthing VAI. In relation to the
strategy manual, we identify the signs READY, POSITIVE, OK and ALREADY not as
connective, but as signs that are recommended for the cohesion of the temporal construction.
The use of the float is an important strategy for simultaneous temporal orations, based on
maintaining the non-dominant hand throughout the signing time. Finally, juxtaposition also
corresponds to a strategy for articulating hypotactic temporal adverbial clauses. In this case,
there is no manual or non-manual signal to set this marking.
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