Some Unfinished Thoughts on FINISH

Fischer, Susan D.; Gough, Bonnie

doi:10.1075/sll.2.1.08fis

Cited by 49 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…it can be both an aspect marker and a main verb (Fischer & Gough, 1999). When FINISH occurs either with the basic negator nOT or the negative completive nOT-YeT/LATe, however, it can function only as a main verb.…”

Section: Negative Completivementioning

confidence: 99%

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Zeshan¹

2006

172

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The Sign Language Typology Series is dedicated to the comparative study of sign languages around the world. Individual or collective works that systematically explore typological variation across sign languages are the focus of this series, with particular emphasis on undocumented, underdescribed and endangered sign languages. The scope of the series primarily includes cross-linguistic studies of grammatical domains across a larger or smaller sample of sign languages, but also encompasses the study of individual sign languages from a typological perspective and comparison between signed and spoken languages in terms of language modality, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to sign language typology. We started talking about sign languages and deaf communities, and, becoming more and more surprised at all the strange facts I was bringing to his notice, he summed up our discussion with the words: "I only came to find a new television, but I found a whole new world!". Since 1994, my work in the world of deaf communities in various countries has brought with it a constant stream of memorable moments. A nightly journey in 1998 on a bicycle-rickshaw through a quarter of the old city in Delhi to visit a deaf family, in almost total darkness due to one of the usual electricity cuts. The first Indian conference on bilingualism in deaf education in Hyderabad in 2001. A long evening in Eskişehir learning the local games of chance in the deaf club together with some of my first Turkish signs. A week trapped in snowstorms in the worst Istanbul winter in decades, and severe Monsoon floodings in Mumbai. And above all, the long nights of relentless and addictive signing.Working in developing countries means working under the constant strain of insufficient resources and, at times, personal hardship, but more often than not, this is counterbalanced by the amazing human resources to be found in the deaf communities themselves. I gratefully acknowledge that they have been my main source of inspiration, and so it is to them that I wish to dedicate this volume.On the academic side, I am no less grateful to the many people who have accompanied me on various stages of the journey towards the beginnings of sign language typology. I owe a lot to the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) in Australia, which was my host institution in Canberra and in Melbourne between 1999 and 2003. The framework for a large cross-linguistic study on negatives and interrogatives in sign languages, which has resulted in the present volume, first took shape at the RCLT. The subsequent development of the project is something that still surprises me. Having designed questionnaires and contacted possible collaborators around the world, the sensible expectation, which luckily I was not aware of at the time, would have been to get some basic information from a handful of respondents, if not less. Instead, I received responses for sign languages from 18 countries, varying from a few basic written answers to complete 20-page papers. Mo...

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Section: Negative Completivementioning

confidence: 99%

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Zeshan¹

2006

172

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“…However, while the noun involves repetition, this repetition is usually lost in the grammaticalized form. Numerous other modality-independent pathways have been identified in previous studies; these include developments (i) from verb/noun/adjective to modal verb (Wilcox & Wilcox 1995;Janzen & Shaffer 2002), (ii) from verb/adverbial to completive/perfective aspect marker (Fischer & Gough 1972Meir 1999), and (iii) from adjective to intensifier (Sexton 1999). For discussion of these and other phenomena, as well as for further references, the interested reader is referred to the overview articles by Pfau & Steinbach (2006, Wilcox et al (2010), and Janzen (2012).…”

Section: Grammaticalization Of Lexical Elementsmentioning

confidence: 98%

person climbing up a tree

Pfau

Steinbach

2013

SL&L

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“…As such, she distinguishes it from, for example, Rathmann's (2005) proposal for the hold marker in ASL, which he suggests indicates an event was interrupted, or the sign finish analyzed as a marker of perfectivity (cf. Fischer & Gough 1999). Under Wilbur's account of EndState as a telicity morpheme, it manifests as several allomorphs (since many different kinds of changes across the prosodic timing slots count as the EndState marker) and it is further subject to morpho/phonological constraints -most notably, it does not co-occur with spatial verbs.…”

Section: Telicity In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between verbal form and event structure in sign languages

Davidson

Kocab

Sims

et al. 2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Whether predicates describe events as inherently bounded (telic) or unbounded (atelic) is usually understood to be an emergent property that depends on several factors; few, if any, spoken languages have dedicated morphology to mark the distinction. It is thus surprising that sign languages have been proposed to have dedicated morphology for telicity, and moreover that it takes a form which iconically reflects the underlying event structure-this is known as the "Event Visibility Hypothesis" (EVH) (Wilbur 2008). The EVH has been extended with claims about its universality in sign languages (Wilbur 2008; Malaia & Wilbur 2012), its gradient nature (Kuhn 2017), and its iconic transparency (Strickland et al. 2015). However, in this paper we argue that the status of this relationship between form and meaning remains an open question due to (a) lack of independent tests for telicity, (b) lack of lexical coverage, (c) lack of demonstration that formal expressions of telicity are morphological in nature, rather than a lexical property, and (d) inability to sufficiently dissociate telicity and perfectivity. We present new data coming from verbs that alternate in both form and meaning in ASL that is in line with the EVH, and conclude that while there is evidence supporting a morphological marker, the proposed form and telicity are not isomorphic in their distribution, significantly limiting the "visibility" of the event structure. We further propose that much of the related iconicity is the result of several independent factors also found in spoken languages, so that sign languages may be more similar to spoken languages than typically implied in this domain.

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Some Unfinished Thoughts on FINISH

Cited by 49 publications

References 0 publications

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

person climbing up a tree

The relationship between verbal form and event structure in sign languages

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