The Licensing of Null Arguments in American Sign Language

Abstract

The distribution of null arguments across languages has been accounted for in terms of two distinct strategies: licensing by agreement and licensing by topic. Lillo-Martin (1986 claims that American Sign Language (ASL) exploits both strategies for licensing null arguments, depending on the morphological characteristics of the verb. Here we show that this is incorrect. Once the nonmanual correlates of agreement features (comparable to the nonmanual expressions of other syntactic features) in ASL are recognized, it becomes apparent that null arguments in this language are systematically licensed by an expression of syntactic agreement.

A framework for continuous multimodal sign language recognition

“…Works such as [2,33,3] focused on the role of head pose and body movement in sign language. These researchers found evidence which strongly linked head tilts and forwards movements to questions, or affirmations.…”

Incorporating facial features into a multi-channel gesture recognition system for the interpretation of Irish Sign Language sequences

“…Works such as [2,24,3] focused on the role of head pose and body movement in sign language, where they reported a strong correlation linking head tilts and forwards movements to questions, or affirmations. The analysis of facial expressions for the interpretation of sign language has also received a significant amount of interest [10,9].…”

Parallelism revisited

“…B: yes, Ø ¬Agr eat-up Ø ¬Agr 'Yes, I ate it up' (adapted from Lillo-Martin 1991) The analysis has undergone further modification in Bahan et al (2000), who argue that across verb classes, the null subject/object is of the Romance variety -i.e. like in (1) -and examples like that of speaker B in (2) are accounted for by appealing to non-manual agreement found in such sentences.…”

“…Thus, Bahan et al (2000) have taken the paradigm in (3)-(6) as evidence that the relevant null element in ASL is always licensed by agreement (Agr) in the manner commonly argued for in languages with 'rich verbal morphology' , e.g. Italian or Spanish.…”

“…Rizzi 1986). This analysis has been applied to both subjects and objects of either all verb classes (Bahan et al 2000) or agreeing verbs only (Lillo-Martin 1991). In this squib, I demonstrate that the nature of both the null subject and the null object in ASL does not neatly parallel that of Spanish, taken here to be a representative of consistent null subject languages (Biberauer et al 2010).…”