Person and Number Agreement in American Sign Language. Hyun-Jong Hahm The University of Texas at Austin

Transcription

1 Person and Number Agreement in American Sign Language Hyun-Jong Hahm The University of Texas at Austin 1. Goal 1 Signed languages and spoken languages have many similarities, but also differ due to the different modalities: visual-gestural modality vs. auditory-vocal modality. This paper examines person and number agreement in American Sign Language (ASL, hereafter) through the recordings of a native signer (a Deaf) within the HPSG framework. 2. ASL pronouns and verbs 2.1 ASL pronoun and person features Articulation of a pronoun is accomplished by the index finger, pointing to the location in space associated with the intended referent. In pronouns, plural number is mostly marked by a sweeping or circular movement, such as in Y'ALL/THEY and ALL-OF- US. (I will use Y ALL for second person plural.) There is a set of pronouns called number-incorporated pronouns (e.g. TWO-OF-US/YOU/THEM, THREE-OF- US/YOU/THEM, etc.). They have determinate number values, up to nine depending on the signer, along with the singular pronouns having singular. The pronouns in plural (e.g. WE) are blocked by the determinate number pronouns, hence they can only be interpreted as having cardinality greater than those determinate numbers. Instead of a three person system, Meier (1990) argued that the pronominal system of ASL is best described in terms of a first/non-first person distinction and that there is no evidence for a grammatical distinction in ASL between second and third person. One of his arguments for a distinct first person hinged on certain idiosyncratic properties of first person forms, in particular the pronouns WE and OUR, which do not specify the number or locations of their referents in any direct way and point to only the signer. 2.2 ASL Verb Types Padden (1988) categorized verbs into the following three classes: plain, spatial, and agreement verbs. 2 Plain verbs (e.g. LIKE) are not marked morphologically for subject or object agreement. Spatial verbs (e.g. PUT) and agreement verbs (e.g. GIVE), both use the signing space referentially. But the spatial verbs show agreement with locations associated with the initial and final positions of motion. Agreement verbs 1 The examples in this paper are what I gathered from a ASL native signer, unless I specify the source. Great thanks to Franky Ramont for help, who is a Deaf and also an ASL instructor at Linguistics dept. UT Austin. 2 Agreement verbs are also called inflecting verbs (Padden 1988) and indicating verbs (Liddell 2000).

2 use spatial locations to mark subject and/or object agreement. Agreement verbs have two subtypes: single-agreement verbs, agreeing only with the object (e.g. SEE) and double-agreement verbs, agreeing with both the subject and object (e.g. HELP). These agreement verbs mark for Person and Number, and make use of the association between NPs and distinct locations. 3. Agreement features in ASL I explore person and number agreement features with double agreement verb, HELP, examining both subject and object agreement. 3 For double agreement verbs, there are two affixes, a subject agreement prefix and an object agreement suffix that constitute the manual expression of the person and number features of the relevant argument. 3.1 Person features on Agreement Verb The verb HELP starts at (or is oriented towards) the location in space associated with the subject and ends at (or is oriented towards) the location in space associated with the object. 4 For example, S HELP A as in Figure 1 indicates that the verb moves from the location associated with the signer to the location associated with the addressee. Figure 1. SHELP A : When the subject is WE, whether the other referent is the addressee (e.g. YOU AND I) or not (e.g. SHE AND I), the initial point of the verb should be in front of the signer's body, showing 1st person agreement. 5 If the verb starts from the addressee or non-addressee's body, the sentence becomes ungrammatical as in (1a) and (2a): 6 (1) a. * i PT LEARN SIGN 1,2TWO-OF-US 2HELP i b. ipt LEARN SIGN 1,2TWO-OF-US 1HELP i 'You and I will help her i to learn sign.' (2) a. * i PT LEARN SIGN 1,jTWO-OF-US jhelp i b. ipt LEARN SIGN 1,jTWO-OF-US 1HELP i 'He j and I will help her i to learn sign.' 3 The verb HELP can be analyzed more easily than some other verbs due to the two-handed sign, allowing no overlap with other signs. 4 The subscripts on both side of the sign HELP mean that this verb is a dual agreement verb, and the 1 subscript refers to signer (and others), 2 refers to addressee(s) (and others), and i, j, etc. will refer to the non-addressed participant. 5 Professor Meier (in private conversation) commented that for some verbs in which the object is dual, the verb may be agreeing with a midpoint location that lies between the first person locus and the locus associated with the other referent. 6 PT means a pointing sign. I put the loci of the pronoun TWO-OF-US on the left side of it. SM means subject marking; OM object marking.

3 However, when the subject is Y'ALL, the initial point of the verb tends to be the midpoint between the referents or the locus in neutral signing space, regardless of whether the other referent is an addressee or non-addressee participant, showing that there is no distinction between 2nd and 3rd person values as in (3). (3) MARY i PT 2,iTWO-OF-YOU b/w2,ihelp 1 'Mary i (not present) and you will help me to sign.' Person agreement with object argument shows the same patterns: 7 (4) a. * 2 PT TEST G-R-A-D-E CHECK ipt i HELP 2 1,2TWO-OF-US GRADE b. 2PT TEST G-R-A-D-E CHECK ipt i HELP 1 1,2TWO-OF-US GRADE 'She i will help you and me to grade the tests.' (5) a. *LEARN SIGN 2PT 2HELP i i,1two-of-us b. LEARN SIGN 2PT 2HELP 1 i,1two-of-us 'You help her i and me to learn sign.' (6) i,2two-of-you LEARN SIGN 1HELP b/w2,i or neut i,2two-of-you 'I will help her i and you to learn sign.' Thus, what matters is only whether the locus for person values is near the signer's body or not, confirming 1st vs. non-1st person distinction. 3.2 Number Agreement Verbs in singular are the uninflected verb stems. The agreement trigger of the singular verb can be either in singular number or plural but in the latter case it is considered as a single group/entity collectively, as shown in the following example: 8 (7) ASL STUDENT PT j.pl SIGN 2HELP j,sg 'You (sg) will help them [ASL students]j to sign.' As Padden (1988) noted, the verb cannot show subject number agreement in plural. That is, signed languages show object agreement more than subject agreement, which is contrary to the typological generalization of spoken languages. The initial point of the verb HELP cannot show the sweeping movement to show plural number agreement: 7 G-R-A-D-E means that the sign is finger-spelled. 8 Showing singular agreement in the predicate with the collective plural is not unusual in spoken languages.

4 (8) a. * i PT LEARN SIGN WE 1,PL HELP i,sg b. i PT LEARN SIGN WE 1,SG HELP i,sg 'We will help her i to learn sign.' As for dual number agreement, Klima & Bellugi (1979) and Padden (1988) argue that the verb shows dual agreement with the subject and/or object argument. However, a native ASL Deaf person uses verbs in a default form singular with the numberincorporated pronouns (e.g. TWO-OF-YOU, THREE-OF-YOU, etc.) unless she really wants to emphasize the individual argument. Ultimately, I suggest that verbs distinguish only singular and plural number, unlike the determinate number values of pronouns described above. Also we should keep in mind that the verbs do not agree in number with the subject argument. 4. Theoretical approach Only one subtype of verbs, agreement-verb-lexeme, shows the object and/or subject agreement morphologically: (9) verb-lexeme plain-verb-lexeme spatial-verb-lexeme agreement-verb-lexeme single-agr-v double-agr-v A singular verb agrees with a singular nominal, number-incorporated pronouns in singular, dual, trial, etc., or a collective plural argument, while a plural verb requires a plural argument. I suggest that ASL has a plural/non-plural number distinction and the plural number is marked. The plural number verbs agree with only plural agreement triggers. Otherwise, the default form of the verbs in singular is used. I propose the following number value hierarchy in ASL. ASL double agreement verbs show number agreement with the object argument in plural or non-plural: (10) num plural[specific -] non-plural[specific +] non-singular singular dual trial... For example, number-incorporated pronouns can have number values like dual, trial, etc., but the verb does not have those numbers and agrees in plural or non-plural number. When the verb is in singular and the object argument is in plural, the

5 agreement trigger is interpreted as a "single" group collectively but with a "specific" number. The type agreement-verb-lexeme has constraints on the object agreement and the single agreement verbs just inherit them without posing any extra constraints. The double agreement verbs have the constraints on subject person agreement. The verbal types automatically explain the fact that the verb does not agree in number with the subject argument, due to lack of any constraint on it. Simplified constraints on the types agreement-verb-lxm and double-agr-verb-lxm are proposed below. 9 (11) a. agreement-verb-lxm : b. double-agr-verb-lxm: PHON F([4],[3], x)... LOCUS SYNSEM [5] ARG -ST < [1]NP, [2]NP NUM OBJ < [2] > PHON [4] STEM SYNSEM [5] x > [3] [ ]... NUM [3] PHON F(y, [6], [4],,, )... SYNSEM [5] ARG -ST < [1]NP LOCUS SUBJ < [1] > PHON [4] STEM SYNSEM [5] [ y]... > 5. Conclusion and comments Some verbs show object agreement in person and number and a subset of those verbs show subject agreement in person. This differs from the typological generalization governing spoken languages, according to which subject agreement is favored over object agreement. The ASL person paradigm has a 1st vs. non-1st person distinction. Based on spoken languages, many scholars (Greenberg 1963, Corbett 2000, etc.) have argued that the first person is ranked above than other persons in the person hierarchy (1>2>3): an NP denoting a group that includes the speaker triggers first person agreement. In ASL (1>2,3), NPs including the signer trigger 1st person verb agreement, and the verb in non-1st person is ungrammatical as in the example (8) above. Hence ASL resembles spoken languages with respect to the person hierarchy. Turning to number, pronouns in ASL can be number-incorporated (up to 9ish), while the verb has either plural or non-plural (singular). The plural verbs agree with only plural arguments. Otherwise, the verbs are in singular. The verb does not show number agreement with the subject at all. These facts are captured by the constraints on the types verb and number. 9 Cormier et al. propose a type [LOCUS locus] in INDEX, whose value is 1, 2, i, etc. in this paper's notation. These locus values play an important role for person agreement.

6 Selected References: Cormier, Kearsy Grammaticization of Indexic Signs: How American Sign Language Expresses Numerosity. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin Cormier, Kearsy, Stephen Wechsler, and Richard Meier Locus Agreement in American Sign Language. In Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation. Eds. G. Webelhuth, J-P. Koenig and A. Kathol. Standford: CSLI publications. Cysouw, Michael The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, Joseph H Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of Language. Cambridge: MIT Press. pp Hahm, Hyun-Jong A Cross-linguistic Study of Mixed Agreement with the Polite/Formal Pronoun Subjects. Qualifying paper, University of Texas, Austin. Klima, Edward and Ursula Bellugi The Signs of Language. Cambridge, MA: Varvard University Press. Meier, Richard Person Deixis in ASL, in S. Fischer and P. Siple, eds., Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research: Vol.1: Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Padden, Carol Interaction of Morphology and Syntax in American Sign Language. Garland Publishing, Inc.: New York and London. Wechsler, Stephen and Larisa Zlatíc The Many Faces of Agreement. Stanford: CSLI Publications.