What You See Is What You Get.Get: Surface Transparency and Ambiguity of Nominalizing Reduplication in American Sign Language

Abstract

Nominalizing reduplication in American Sign Language (ASL) is an ambiguous process that can derive both concrete object‐ and result‐denoting nominals. The properties of this nominalization process, including this ambiguity, are accounted for here by appealing to the discrete and surface transparent morphology that the language uses to encode components of event (Wilbur ) and argument (Benedicto & Brentari ) structure. Nominalizing reduplication is shown to be a process that nominalizes (and reduplicates) only the low portion of verbal structure responsible for encoding the event result (VPres). Direct nominalization of this VPres constituent yields nominals with result‐denoting interpretations. Concrete object‐denoting interpretations may arise when the verbal structure contains an argument classifier, which is evident in the handshape of the verbal predicate. In such cases, the nominal argument introduced by the classifier serves as the input to (reduced) relative clause formation, yielding a concrete object‐denoting interpretation. The interpretive ambiguity is thus reduced to ambiguity in the syntactic structure underlying the derived nominal. This approach falls in line with longstanding structural approaches to nominalization and more recent proposals regarding processes of reduplication (Inkelas & Zoll ).

What is in a morpheme? Theoretical, experimental and computational approaches to the relation of meaning and form in morphology

“…While Benedicto & Brentari put forward a highly interesting theoretical account, and have served as a basis for many follow-up studies (Benedicto et al 2007;Grose et al 2007;Mathur & Rathmann 2007;de Lint 2010de Lint , 2018Pavlic 2016;Kimmelman et al 2019;Abner 2017) some of its implications raise questions about the empirical adequacy. In the next section, I will expose some of the problems I found and set out the hypothesis for my experiment, which I will describe in section 4.…”

The Seeds of the Noun–Verb Distinction in the Manual Modality: Improvisation and Interaction in the Emergence of Grammatical Categories

“…Nevertheless, most documented sign languages demonstrate a set of noun-verb pairs distinguished by altering properties of a shared underlying form and display striking cross-linguistic commonalities in how these distinctions are made (Tkachman and Sandler 2013). Such distinctions have been shown primarily to operate over subsets of noun-verb pairs associated with concrete objects and instrumental actions (e.g., WINDOW/CLOSE-WINDOW) where the base form is iconically motivated (e.g., the two hands representing two panes of a window), though Abner (2017) provides evidence that this alternation is not limited to concrete object nouns in ASL but is also available to derive abstract, result-denoting nouns (e.g., ACCEPTANCE derived from ACCEPT). For practical reasons, experiments eliciting this contrast (including those detailed in the current manuscript) are limited to the concrete object portion of this paradigm, as these are easier to depict in video and pictorial stimuli.…”

The iconic motivation for the morphophonological distinction between noun–verb pairs in American Sign Language does not reflect common human construals of objects and actions

“…Both within and across sign languages, nouns can be derived from verbs through a variety of methods, including changing mouthing ( Johnston, 2001 ), combining multiple signs ( Tkachman & Sandler, 2013 ), and changing the morphophonological structure of the verb, including modifying the handshape or movement of the sign ( Abner, 2017 , Kimmelman, Klezovich, & Moroz, 2018 ; Padden et al, 2015 ). Reduplication of the verb is a robust form of noun derivation in sign languages ( Abner, 2017 ; Supalla & Newport, 1978 ). Accompanying the reduplication of a signed verb is a change in the quality of sign movement such that the movement of the noun is smaller and more restrained relative to the verb, leading to a shorter articulation time ( Hunger, 2006 ).…”