Variable “subject” presence in Australian Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language

McKee, Rachel; Schembri, Adam; McKee, David; Johnston, Trevor

doi:10.1017/s0954394511000123

Cited by 58 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While studies by McKee et al (2011) indicate that agreement verbs do indeed slightly favour null subjects in Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language (with 57% and 54% respectively of all tokens occurring with no overt subject argument) as proposed by Lillo-Martin (1986) and others, this research also shows that spatial verbs (73% for Auslan and 66% for New Zealand Sign Language) and plain verbs (60% and 53%) also occur most often without an overtly expressed subject argument. It is thus not clear how the agreement analysis accounts for these patterns, and the data suggest that other factors such as co-reference and structural priming (see McKee et al 2011 for more detail) are also important in influencing variable subject expression (predictions about structural priming would fall directly out of a usage-based constructionist model such as the one we are proposing here).…”

Section: Syntactic Properties Of Indicating Verbssupporting

confidence: 42%

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

Schembri

Cormier

Fenlon³

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we present arguments for an analysis of indicating verbs, building on Liddell (2000), as a typologically unique, unimodal fusion of signs and pointing gestures used for reference tracking. This contrasts with many formalist analyses that assume that directionality in indicating verbs constitutes an agreement marking system. While exploring some of the debate in the literature about these forms, we propose a model of indicating verbs within a Construction Grammar framework that compares them to multimodal constructions in spoken languages. We explain how our model of indicating verbs appear to align with a growing body of research on co-speech gesture and is supported by some recent findings about these verbs from corpus-based studies of sign languages.

show abstract

Section: Syntactic Properties Of Indicating Verbssupporting

confidence: 42%

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

Schembri

Cormier

Fenlon³

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Swabey, 2002, 2011; Wulf et al, 2002; McKee et al, 2011). They used zero anaphora from plain verbs more than from agreement verbs and constructed action.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet few studies have investigated this question for sign languages (Wulf et al, 2002; Swabey, 2002, 2011; Morgan, 2006; McKee et al, 2011; Perniss and Özyürek, 2015). The first studies to investigate this question have primarily looked at variable subject presence, that is, overt versus null subjects, in Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language (McKee et al, 2011), and American Sign Language (Wulf et al, 2002). These studies found evidence confirming that the use of fuller versus leaner linguistic referential expressions varies as a function of referent accessibility across both the oral-aural and visual-manual modalities.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Frederiksen

Mayberry

2016

Lingua

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Discussions of reference tracking in spoken languages often invoke some version of a referential hierarchy. In this paper, we asked whether this hierarchy applies equally well to reference tracking in a visual language, American Sign Language, or whether modality differences influence its structure. Expanding the results of previous studies, this study looked at ASL referential devices beyond nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphora. We elicited four simple narratives from eight native ASL signers, and examined how the signers tracked reference throughout their stories. We found that ASL signers follow general principles of the referential hierarchy proposed for spoken languages by using nouns for referent introductions, and zero anaphora for referent maintenance. However, we also found significant differences such as the absence of pronouns in the narratives, despite their existence in ASL, and differential use of verbal and constructed action zero anaphora. Moreover, we found that native signers’ use of classifiers varied with discourse status in a way that deviated from our expectations derived from the referential hierarchy for spoken languages. On this basis, we propose a tentative hierarchy of referential expressions for ASL that incorporates modality specific referential devices.

show abstract

“…Each of the studies mentioned above are based on elicited or informant data. Wulf et al (2002) and McKee et al (2011), in contrast, analyze spontaneous narratives to study patterns of argument drop in ASL and Auslan and NZSL, respectively. Wulf et al (2002) focus on the behavior of plain verbs and report that just 35% of the examples in their data set include a subject pronoun.…”

Section: Pro-drop In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…McKee et al (2011) report broadly overlapping results in their study of Auslan and NZSL, which is based on data acquired with the same methods as in Wulf et al's (2002) investigation. In addition, McKee et al (2011) note that what they call "partial agreement verbs" -verbs which agree spatially with an object but have a fixed starting locus on the body -more often co-occur with an overt subject than double agreement verbs in Auslan. Plain verbs are reported to slightly favor subject expression.…”

Section: Pro-drop In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body-anchored verbs and argument omission in two sign languages

Oomen

Kimmelman

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using quantitative methods, we analyze naturalistic corpus data in two sign languages, German Sign Language and Russian Sign Language, to study subject-omission patterns. We find that, in both languages, the interpretation of null subjects depends on the type of the verb. With verbs signed on the signer's body (body-anchored verbs), null subjects are interpreted only as first person. With verbs signed in neutral space in front of the signer (neutral verbs), this restriction does not apply. We argue that this is an effect of iconicity: for body-anchored verbs, the signer's body is a part of the iconic representation of the verbal event, and by default the body is interpreted as referring to the signer, that is, as first person. We develop a formal analysis using a mechanism of mixed agreement, taking inspiration from Matushansky's (2013) account of mixed gender agreement in Russian. Specifically, we argue that body-anchored verbs bear an inherent feature that gives a first-person interpretation to null subjects. When a body-anchored verb is combined with an overt third-person subject, a feature mismatch occurs which is resolved in favor of the third person. Neutral verbs do not come with inherent feature-value specifications, thus allowing all person interpretations. We also explain how our analysis predicts the interpretation of null subjects in the context of role shift. With our account, we demonstrate that iconicity plays an active role in the grammar of sign languages, and we pin down the locus of the iconicity effect. While no iconic or modality-specific syntactic mechanisms are needed to account for the data, iconicity is argued to determine feature specification on a subset of sign language verbs.

show abstract

Variable “subject” presence in Australian Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language

Cited by 58 publications

References 28 publications

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives

Body-anchored verbs and argument omission in two sign languages

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About