Relational Grammar and American Sign Language

ASL Syntax

“…Topic Marking (Fischer 1974(Fischer , 1975Kegl, 1976;Friedman 1976) Left Dislocation (Fischer 1975) NP Fronting (Fischer 1974) Auxiliary Hopping (Fischer 1974) Passive, Object Incorporation, Advancement Rules, Deletion Rules, Agreement Marking (Kegl 1976) Our leanings differ from past research in that we reduce the focus on word order and concern ourselves primarily with cases of verb inflection. Furthermore, in keeping with the methodology of Fischer (1974) we strive not only to describe syntactic processes, but to formally represent them.…”

“…The signer uses some or all of these aspects of the sign verb to mark subject and object. In previous work (Kegl 1976) we argued that directionality away from an agreement marker marked agentivity and that use of the signer's body as an agreement marker is the grammatical marking of subject. Further research into these and other claim is needed.…”

“…Contrary to previous research (Fischer 1973(Fischer , 1975Friedman 1976), it is our contention that a language which is highly inflected need not use a particular basic word order to express grammatical relations. This alternative is discussed in more detail in Kegl (1976) and Kegl, Lentz and Philip (1976). However, ASL signers, being essentially bilingual in ASL and English, will accept and some even tend to prefer an SVO order in ASL, but for the most part grammatical relations in ASL are expressed by verb inflection.…”

“…They each have their own advantages and hopefully by looking at the process in both perspectives, we will get a better iadea of what is going on. For further discussion of these kinds of sentences and the process of registration and phonological blending (in the Relational Grammar framework), see Kegl (1976). This analysis as well needs further refinement.…”

“…Either all the forms are related in the lexicon by word formation rules (TG) or they are the result of a grammatical rule of object incorporation (RG). For a discussion of this rule, see Kegl (1976).…”