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It has been claimed that in American Sign Language (ASL), the sign glossed as IX is used for a variety of functions, including personal pronouns, locatives, and determiners (Meier and Lillo-Martin 2013). We propose to unify these disparate functions by analyzing IX as a demonstrative, appearing with or without an overt complement. Appealingly simple, this move accounts for a wide range of facts regarding the distribution and interpretation of IX. We focus on points to third-person referents. Such points are directed toward loci -real people, objects, or locations in the physical space around the signer, or places (possibly arbitrarily) associated with their referents in the signed discourse (Lillo-Martin and Klima 1990). The loci themselves raise considerable interesting issues (Barberà 2012, Gagne and Davidson 2014); however, their contribution is often conflated with the contribution of IX alone. Thus, we specifically ask: for a sign involving pointing, what is the nature of IX (i.e. the lexical item realized in a pointing hand-shape) when dissociated from the issue of locus (i.e. the space where it points to)?1 We will use the following conventions for notation. Signs are glossed in upper case words that are their closest translation equivalents; '#' indicates that the lexical item that follows is fingerspelled. Lower-case letters appended to sign glosses refer to spatial loci; the letters do not stand for particular locations in space (which are often arbitrarily assigned), except for 'neu' (neutral space) -an area in front of the signer with no assigned locus. IX followed by a word in parentheses indicates that the point was directed at the object named, e.g. IX(phone). A line above glosses indicates non-manual marking; 't' stands for topic marking and 'wh' for wh-question marking. Somewhat unconventionally (but replicating the relevant source), we use 'CL IX' for a two-handed construction involving a '1'-classifier signed with a non-dominant hand and IX with the dominant one.

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The focus of the paper is a phenomenon well documented in both monolingual and bilingual English acquisition: argument omission. Previous studies have shown that bilinguals acquiring a null and a non-null argument language simultaneously tend to exhibit unidirectional cross-language interaction effects — the null argument language remains unaffected but over-suppliance of overt elements in the null argument language is observed. Here subject and object omission in both ASL (null argument) and English (non-null argument) of young ASL-English bilinguals is examined. Results demonstrate that in spontaneous English production, ASL-English bilinguals omit subjects and objects to a higher rate, for longer, and in unexpected environments when compared with English monolinguals and bilinguals; no effect on ASL is observed. Findings also show that the children differentiate between their two languages — rates of argument omission in English are different during ASL vs. English target sessions differ. Implications for the general theory of bilingual effects are offered.