Search

This dissertation presents two extensive case studies in the morpho-syntactic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) based on original fieldwork conducted with native, deaf signers.The first case study focuses on the structure of attributive and predicative POSS possessives. Based on language-internal diagnostics, this study shows that the possessive marker, POSS, functions as a verbal predicate of possession, not as a DP-internal marker of the possessive relation. The structure and interpretation of predicative POSS possessives are reduced to the interaction of the verbal POSS structure with two functional components of the predicative domain: (i) locative structure and (ii) licensing positions of definite objects. Attributive POSS possessives are derived as prenominal reduced relative clause modifiers formed from this underlying predicative structure. The second case study presented here addresses the structural uniformity and semantic ambiguity of two classes of deverbal nominals formed via reduplication in ASL: concrete object-denoting nominals and result-denoting nominals. Based on a morpho-semantic decomposition of verbal structure that is transparent in the surface form of verbal predicates in ASL, it is shown that nominalization via reduplication targets the lowest constituent of the verbal structure (VP-Res ). Nominalization of VP-Res yields the class of result-denoting nominals, while concrete object-denoting nominals are derived as relative clause structures headed by a nominal argument that is introduced by the classifier structure present in the relevant verbal forms.

International audience; Several online dictionaries documenting the lexicon of a variety of sign languages (SLs) are now available. These are rich resources for comparative studies, but there are methodological issues that must be addressed regarding how these resources are used for research purposes. We created a web-based tool for annotating the articulatory features of signs (handshape, location, movement and orientation). Videos from online dictionaries may be embedded in the tool, providing a mechanism for large-scale theoretically-informed sign language annotation. Annotations are saved in a spreadsheet format ready for quantitative and qualitative analyses. Here, we provide proof of concept for the utility of this tool in linguistic analysis. We used the SL adaptation of the Swadesh list (Woodward, 2000) and applied lexicostatistic and phylogenetic methods to a sample of 23 SLs coded using the web-based tool; supplementary historic information was gathered from the Ethnologue of World Languages and other online sources. We report results from the comparison of all articulatory features for four Asian SLs (Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Japanese SLs) and from the comparison of handshapes on the entire 23 language sample. Handshape analysis of the entire sample clusters all Asian SLs together, separated from the European, American, and Brazilian SLs in the sample, as historically expected. Within the Asian SL cluster, analyses also show, for example, marginal relatedness between Chinese and Hong Kong SLs.