Morphological Inflections and Syntactic Representations of Person and Number in ASL

Cet article examine dans la langue des signes américaine (ASL) l’expression des traits de nombre en relation avec les traits de personne (les deux étant néanmoins séparables). Dans les domaines nominal et verbal, nous considérons quelques parallélismes dans la manifestation spatiale des traits d’accord qui peuvent être conçus comme des conséquences naturelles de l’existence, dans les deux domaines, de projections fonctionnelles de personne, de nombre, et d’aspect.This article examines the expression of number features in relation to (but as distinct from) person features in ASL. We consider parallelisms in the spatial instantiation of agreement features in the nominal and verbal domains, which may be seen as natural consequences of the existence, in both domains, of functional projections of person, number, and aspect

The syntax of American Sign Language : functional categories and hierarchical structure

Recent research on the syntax of signed languages has revealed that, apart from some modality-specific differences, signed languages are organized according to the same underlying principles as spoken languages. This book addresses the organization and distribution of functional categories in American Sign Language (ASL), focusing on tense, agreement, and wh-constructions. Signed languages provide illuminating evidence about functional projections of a kind unavailable in the study of spoken languages. Along with manual signing, crucial information is expressed by specific movements of the face and upper body. The authors argue that such nonmanual markings are often direct expressions of abstract syntactic features. The distribution and intensity of these markings provide information about the location of functional heads and the boundaries of functional projections. The authors show how evidence from ASL is useful for evaluating a number of recent theoretical proposals on, among other things, the status of syntactic agreement projections and constraints on phrase structure and the directionality of movement

Realizations of syntactic agreement in American sign language: Similarities between the clause and the noun phrase

ASL syntax makes essential use of specific non‐manual expressions of syntactic features (e.g., +neg, +wh) that co‐occur with manual signs. These markings occur obligatorily with manual material contained in the node of origin and optionally extend over the c‐command domain of that node, thus providing important evidence for hierarchical structure. In this article, we show that agreement features, both within the clause and the noun phrase, also have non‐manual correlates that exhibit the predicted distribution. Interestingly, transitive IPs and possessive DPs pattern together in their manifestation of agreement marking, while intransitive IPs pattern with non‐possessive DPs