According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.
The sign language phenomenon that some scholars refer to as "agreement" has triggered controversial discussions among sign language linguists. Crucially, it has been argued to display properties that are at odds with the notion of agreement in spoken languages. A thorough theoretical investigation of the phenomenon may thus add to our understanding of the nature and limits of agreement in natural language. Previous analyses of the phenomenon can be divided into three groups: (i) gesture-based non-syntactic analyses, (ii) hybrid solutions combining syntactic and semantic agreement, and (iii) syntactic accounts under which agreement markers are reanalyzed as clitics. As opposed to these accounts, we argue in this paper that sign language agreement does represent an instance of agreement proper, as familiar from spoken language, that is fully governed by syntactic principles. We propose an explicit formal analysis couched within the Minimalist Program that is modality-independent and only involves mechanisms that have been independently proposed for the analysis of agreement in spoken language. Our proposal is able to capture the (apparent) peculiarities of sign language agreement such as the distinction of verb types (only some verbs show agreement), the behavior of backwards verbs (verbs displaying agreement reversal), and the distribution of the agreement auxiliary. However, we suggest that the combination of mechanisms is modality-specific, that is, agreement in sign language, and in German Sign Language in particular, involves modality-independent ingredients, but uses a modality-specific recipe which calls for a (somewhat) unusual combination of independently motivated mechanisms.
The expression of standard negation by means of manual and/or non-manual markers has been described for a considerable number of sign languages. Typological comparisons have revealed an intriguing dichotomy: while some sign languages require a manual negative element in negative clauses (manual-dominant sign languages), in others negation can be realized by a non-manual marker alone (in particular a headshake; non-manual-dominant sign languages). We are here adding data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) to the picture, and we demonstrate that NGT belongs to the latter group. Still, detailed comparison suggests that NGT patterns differently from other non-manual-dominant sign languages, thereby improving our understanding of the typological variation in this domain. A novel contribution of the present study is that it is based on naturalistic corpus data, showing more variation than often found in elicitation and grammaticality judgment studies of sign languages, but also presenting new problems of interpretation.
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