The syntax of sign language agreement: Common ingredients, but unusual recipe

Abstract

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.

A usage-based alternative to “lexicalization” in sign language linguistics

“…In these glossed representations, and in the varying English free translations, there is variation in the word order and argument structure for each construction. The verbal signs bring-in and take-to are also directed to varied regions of signing space around the signer in each example, as they participate in discourse-level argument-structure constructions (see Janzen O'Dea & Shaffer 2001;Meir 2012;Hou & Meier 2018;Pfau, Salzmann & Steinbach 2018;Schembri, Cormier & Fenlon 2018). In 1aand 1c, the sign bring-in moves from the signer's right to the space in front of the signer's body (as in Figure 2b), coding a third party as the agent of the verb.…”

Differential object marking in sign languages

“…Since the early days of sign language linguistics, it has been known that verbs may be modified to "incorporate" features of arguments (e.g., Friedman 1976;Padden 1988 Pfau, Salzmann & Steinbach 2018). In short, a verb like give may have a lexical citation form resembling a hand gripping an object and reaching out from the signer's own body outwards.…”

“…directed towards), with subject indication being less frequent (cf. Rathmann & Mathur 2002;Mathur & Rathmann 2012;Pfau, Salzmann & Steinbach 2018). That is, if a verb is modified with respect to only one argument, it tends to be the object, suggesting that directionality is more of an object marking (or tracking) device than a subject marking device.…”

“…(Fenlon, Schembri & Cormier 2018: 106) Thus, although there might be modality-effects in the motivations for directional modification, it is again apparent that it is a device that targets arguments (particularly objects) with certain features, and that these features overlap with those associated with DOM -in this case, animacy and person. Pfau, Salzmann & Steinbach (2018) note the differential marking patterns with directional modification in that it "is sensitive to the person, animacy and specificity value, e.g. is triggered only by local person, animate or specific arguments, […] and represents an instance of differential argument encoding".…”

“…Thus, even though the sign is not originally a pointing sign, it acquires the directional element and moves in signing space to indicate argument roles by moving from subject location to object location (like directional verbs) (Pfau & Steinbach 2013). It has been argued that this auxiliary is used preferably with animate objects and in ditransitive constructions it is modified according to the indirect rather than direct object (see Pfau, Salzmann & Steinbach 2018). Example (3) shows the use of the agreement auxiliary in German Sign Language, which has grammaticalized from the sign person.…”