Free functional elements of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Agreement as possible auxiliaries in Greek Sign Language

Sapountzaki, Galini

doi:10.1075/sll.10.1.08sap

Cited by 12 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…Sign language studies have claimed that the stimulusexperiencer structure is largely absent in psychological verbs in sign languages such as ASL, Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Greek Sign Language (Edge & Herrmann, 1977;Healy, 2015;Kegl, 1990;Meir et al, 2007;Oomen, 2017;Sapountzaki, 2005;Winston, 2013). The reported dispreference for stimulusexperiencer verbs in sign languages has at least two possible explanations, namely verb transitivity and lexicalization of thematic roles.…”

Section: Transitivity and Mapping Between Semantic And Syntactic Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit causality biases and thematic roles in American Sign Language

Frederiksen

Mayberry

2021

Behav Res

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Implicit causality (IC) biases, the tendency of certain verbs to elicit re-mention of either the first-mentioned noun phrase (NP1) or the second-mentioned noun phrase (NP2) from the previous clause, are important in psycholinguistic research. Understanding IC verbs and the source of their biases in signed as well as spoken languages helps elucidate whether these phenomena are language general or specific to the spoken modality. As the first of its kind, this study investigates IC biases in American Sign Language (ASL) and provides IC bias norms for over 200 verbs, facilitating future psycholinguistic studies of ASL and comparisons of spoken versus signed languages. We investigated whether native ASL signers continued sentences with IC verbs (e.g., ASL equivalents of ‘Lisa annoys Maya because…’) by mentioning NP1 (i.e., Lisa) or NP2 (i.e., Maya). We found a tendency towards more NP2-biased verbs. Previous work has found that a verb’s thematic roles predict bias direction: stimulus-experiencer verbs (e.g., ‘annoy’), where the first argument is the stimulus (causing annoyance) and the second argument is the experiencer (experiencing annoyance), elicit more NP1 continuations. Verbs with experiencer-stimulus thematic roles (e.g., ‘love’) elicit more NP2 continuations. We probed whether the trend towards more NP2-biased verbs was related to an existing claim that stimulus-experiencer verbs do not exist in sign languages. We found that stimulus-experiencer structure, while permitted, is infrequent, impacting the IC bias distribution in ASL. Nevertheless, thematic roles predict IC bias in ASL, suggesting that the thematic role-IC bias relationship is stable across languages as well as modalities.

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Section: Transitivity and Mapping Between Semantic And Syntactic Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit causality biases and thematic roles in American Sign Language

Frederiksen

Mayberry

2021

Behav Res

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“…Over time, a comparable use of a similarly glossed sign in several other SLs has been reported (e.g., Rathmann, 2005; Zeshan, 2003; Zucchi, 2009). Yet other lexical signs with slightly different semantics have also been observed being used in similar ways in other SLs (e.g., Meir, 1999; Spaountzaki, 2005). Today some linguists report that grammatical markers for perfective aspect in several SLs have emerged, through processes of grammaticalization, from a lexical verb sign that is often glossed as finish (e.g., Pfau & Steinbach, 2011).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 89%

finishvariation and grammaticalization in a signed language: How far down this well-trodden pathway is Auslan (Australian Sign Language)?

et al. 2015

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Language variation is often symptomatic of ongoing historical change, including grammaticalization. Signed languages lack detailed historical records and a written literature, so tracking grammaticalization in these languages is problematic. Grammaticalization can, however, also be observed synchronically through the comparison of data on variant word forms and multiword constructions in particular contexts and in different dialects and registers. In this paper, we report an investigation of language change and variation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Signs glossed as FINISH were tagged for function (e.g., verb, noun, adverb, auxiliary, conjunction), variation in production (number of hands used, duration, mouthing), position relative to the main verb (pre-or postmodifying), and event types of the clauses in which they appear (states, activities, achievements, accomplishments). The data suggest ongoing grammaticalization may be part of the explanation of the variation-variants correlate with different uses in different linguistic contexts, rather than social and individual factors.Even though variation is present in all languages, Auslan and other signed languages (SLs) appear to have considerable variation in lexicon and grammar. Some of this variation can be attributed to the sociolinguistic characteristics of SL-using communities-relating to the size of these communities, the

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“…The causative use of give , on the other hand, has been described for Greek Sign Language (GSL). Sapountzaki ( 2005 , pp. 131f) argues that the lexical verb give developed into an agreement auxiliary, which she glosses as give-aux .…”

Section: Grammaticalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure and Grammaticalization of Serial Verb Constructions in Sign Language of the Netherlands—A Corpus-Based Study

Couvee

Pfau

2018

Front. Psychol.

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In serial verb constructions (SVCs), multiple independent lexical verbs are combined in a mono-clausal construction. SVCs express a range of grammatical meanings and are attested in numerous spoken languages all around the world. Yet, to date only few studies have investigated the existence and functions of SVCs in sign languages. For the most part, these studies—including a previous study on Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)—relied on elicited data. In this article, we offer a cross-modal typological contribution to the study of SVCs by investigating the phenomenon based on naturalistic corpus data from NGT. A search of the Corpus NGT yielded 41 mono-clausal utterances in which one of a closed set of verbs—namely go, give, take, and call—combines with another lexical verb. While the combinations we found are in important respects reminiscent of SVCs described for spoken languages, our data also confirm the previous finding that the fixed verb in the SVC serves to express agreement (by means of spatial modulation) when the other verb cannot do so. In addition, we identified some novel uses of the verbs go and give: (i) go functioning as a future tense marker and (ii) give functioning as a light verb. We will also discuss aspects of the grammaticalization of SVCs in NGT: from lexical verb to light verb to auxiliary, again offering some comparison to grammaticalization paths described for spoken languages.

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Free functional elements of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Agreement as possible auxiliaries in Greek Sign Language

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Implicit causality biases and thematic roles in American Sign Language

Implicit causality biases and thematic roles in American Sign Language

finishvariation and grammaticalization in a signed language: How far down this well-trodden pathway is Auslan (Australian Sign Language)?

Structure and Grammaticalization of Serial Verb Constructions in Sign Language of the Netherlands—A Corpus-Based Study

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