Gesture as the substrate in the process of ASL grammaticization

'And' or 'or': General use coordination in ASL

“…It's certainly possible that either may have originated from non-linguistic gestures of listing items in the space in front of the body (for coord-shift) or on the fingers of the hand (for coord-l), as the grammaticalization of gestures in sign languages is well documented (Janzen 1999, Janzen & B Shaffer 2002Wilcox & Barb Shaffer 2006;Wilcox 2007, Pfau & Steinbach 2011. In spoken language, these gestures seem to be able to be used with both conjunction and disjunction, and therefore it's perhaps not surprising that they may have evolved into general use coordinators in ASL, as opposed to strictly conjunction or disjunction.…”

person climbing up a tree

“…it undergoes lexicalization prior to grammaticalization) or is turned directly into a grammatical marker. As pointed out in Section 2.3, the former sequence of changes has been claimed to be responsible for the emergence of the ASL tense marker FUTURE (26a) (Janzen & Shaffer 2002). The latter path may take manual and nonmanual gestures as input.…”

“…However, while the noun involves repetition, this repetition is usually lost in the grammaticalized form. Numerous other modality-independent pathways have been identified in previous studies; these include developments (i) from verb/noun/adjective to modal verb (Wilcox & Wilcox 1995;Janzen & Shaffer 2002), (ii) from verb/adverbial to completive/perfective aspect marker (Fischer & Gough 1972Meir 1999), and (iii) from adjective to intensifier (Sexton 1999). For discussion of these and other phenomena, as well as for further references, the interested reader is referred to the overview articles by Pfau & Steinbach (2006, Wilcox et al (2010), and Janzen (2012).…”

“…For American Sign Language (ASL), Janzen & Shaffer (2002) describe the development of a future tense marker from the lexical verb ). Example (2a) illustrates the lexical use of the sign (Janzen & Shaffer 2002:203), while in (2b), the same sign -now glossed as FUTURE tns -does not express change of location but rather encodes future tense (Neidle et al 2000:79).…”

“…In the first path, the gesture first develops into a lexical element, which may then further develop into a functional element. It has been argued, for instance, that the origin of the ASL verb GO-TO, which was the source for the tense marker FUTURE, can be traced back to a very common gesture of the same form that was and still is used among non-signers in France (Janzen & Shaffer 2002 Pfau & Steinbach (2006) and Pfau (2011) for a suggested grammaticalization chain; also see Section 6 for brief discussion) and of the 'palm up' gesture (McKee & Wallingford 2011;van Loon 2012).…”