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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Dear colleagues,<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><o:p><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3> </FONT></o:p></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">I am rather sad about the fact that the "language units have to be arbitrary"-stereotype gets revived in morphology now. That goes together with the fashion of the use of "blending" (following Liddells publications): If one finds an item which has some existence outside language (as, e.g. location), then they argue that we have "blending of language and non-language". <o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">I take a cognitive perspective which says that language is "a phenomenon of the whole body" and only asks whether there is "some coding for some meaning" (keeping the axiom that cognitive/meaning items can be a basic standard of comparison of languages). Under this respect it is more adequate for me to interprete what some people call "blending", is the human procedure to exploit the non-language area for items which can be used as languae units. <o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">From that standpoint it is also clear that sign languages can transport what linguists call 'roles', especially by using location or sign movement direction. For me it is not adequate (neither for spoken nor for signed languages) to hypothesize that any language utterance may systematically consist of sequences like: "language unit(s) - non-language unit(s) - language unit(s) - non-language unit(s) - …".<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">In other words: From a phenomenological view, we have "coding for roles" in sign languages. Which formal status these coding may have (e.g. whether they can be derived from other language phenomena in a certain model by certain means), is a secondary question, interesting for anthropology, cognition, psychology, linguistics, etc. That you can find a model which exactly describes the "language unit(s)-non-language unit(s)"-sequences as underlying normal utterances (= communication in natural language), is no argument that there is any relation to "reality" behind such a model assumption.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><o:p><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3> </FONT></o:p></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">There is no scientific possibility "to show" = to prove (as Sonja Erlenkamp) writes " there is nothing of a linguistic structure that the verb and the noun phrases actually share". Neither you can show (as Dan Slobin writes) that "there is no formal motivation to label any of these participants in the syntactic terms of grammatical relations, grammatical cases". You can only make that rationally valid in a special model of language with special axioms. We all have learned that terms like subject, direct object, indirect object, nominative, accusative, dative or ergative, absolutive, oblique etc. are model dependent and are not definable uniquely for all languages.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">From the standard of comparison, meaning, I would hold the assumption that sign languages do show (= can code) semantic roles.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><o:p><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3> </FONT></o:p></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">As you may notice, I separate "language" and "linguistic" in order to separate the object area (= language as a phenomenon) from the model area (= linguistic models about the functioning of language). (In brackets: No speaker or signer has ever used a "linguistic unit"; they only use "language units") From that perspective, the phenomenon "location" or "movement direction", are language units (following my axiom that a language utterance consists of coding elements used for language in this moment). Which different forms of status they can get in different linguistic models, depends on the model, not on the language.<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Sonja Erlenkamp and Dan Slobin talk about their linguistic models. They should not mix up them with language or "reality" (e.g. by saying: "the language phenomenon X IS a subject or an agreement").<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
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<DIV>Best Regards</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Franz Dotter</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>University of Klagenfurt<BR>Center for Sign Language and Deaf Communication<BR>Funded by: Provincial government of Carinthia, Bundessozialamt Kaernten, European Social Fund<BR>Head: Franz Dotter (hearing)<BR>Collaborators: Elisabeth Bergmeister (deaf), Silke Bornholdt (deaf), Jennifer Dörrschuck (hearing), Katja Hablich (hearing), Christian Hausch (deaf), Marlene Hilzensauer (hearing), Petra Käfer (hearing), Klaudia Krammer (hearing), Christine Kulterer (hearing), Andrea Lackner (hearing), Anita Pirker (deaf), Andrea Skant (hearing), Nathalie Slavicek (hard of hearing), Natalie Unterberger (deaf)<BR>Homepage: <A href="http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/zgh">http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/zgh</A><BR>Deaf server (in German): <A href="http://deaf.uni-klu.ac.at">http://deaf.uni-klu.ac.at</A><BR>Fax: ++43 (0)463 2700 2899<BR>Phone: ++43 (0)463 2700 /2821 (Franz Dotter), /2822 (Andrea Skant), /2823 (Marlene Hilzensauer), /2824 (Klaudia Krammer), /2829 (Christine Kulterer)<BR>Email addresses: <A href="mailto:firstname.lastname@uni-klu.ac.at">firstname.lastname@uni-klu.ac.at</A><BR><BR><BR>>>> "Dan I. Slobin" <slobin@BERKELEY.EDU> 9/20/2009 8:29 >>><BR>I agree entirely with Sonja Erlenkamp's response, on the basis of linguistic work on several sign languages. The directionality of a sign (often along with gaze direction) encodes the relationship between the participants, whose identity has already been established by various means. There is no formal motivation to label any of these participants in the syntactic terms of grammatical relations (subject, direct object, indirect object), grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, dative or ergative, absolutive, oblique), or semantic roles (agent, patient, recipient). All of the necessary information for clause interpretation is present in the meanings of spatial locations, handshapes, and motion; and the interpretation itself does not seem to need anything but some set of semantic roles. It follows that there is no such thing as grammatical agreement in these languages. <BR><BR>I am presently working on a paper on sign languages and typology, in which I suggest that sign languages constitute a possibly unique linguistic type, with no alignment pattern at all. This is because there are no arbitrary grammatical categories to align with formal markers-no nominative/accusative or ergative/absolutive or active/stative or agent/patient, and no relevant formal markers. In fact, alignment may be a peculiarity of the auditory modality, and not a necessary linguistic universal. <BR><BR>Dan Slobin<BR>Psychology & Linguistics<BR>University of California, Berkeley<BR><BR>At 08:18 AM 9/20/2009, Sonja Erlenkamp wrote:<BR><BR></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">Well, I have to say, I don't agree with Ulrike on agreement (no pun intended). Most signed languages do - as far as I can tell - show no agreement patterns at all. There are constructions which are called "agreement" verbs by some researchers, but as for example Scott Liddell has shown for ASL (American Sign Language) in several of his publications from 1998 to this day, these constructions are not agreement patterns, since there is nothing of a linguistic structure that the verb and the noun phrases actually share. They both make use of spatial locations to create reference to participants, but spatial locations are not morphemes in themselves. Signs can be placed at spatial locations, as well as verbs directed to, but space in itself cannot be a morpheme. There are several other reasons why the application of the term "agreement" on this construction is misleading, but I won't go into detail on that one here. The number of researchers who agree with Liddell on this issue for different signed languages has been increasing since he started the debate.<BR> <BR>My own research on Norwegian Sign Languages (and German Sign Language), shows that these two signed languages do use different markings of grammatical relations in different construction types withou any clear S/A or S/O correspondence. The directionality you mention (where movements are directed in space to mark relations between participants by means of prompting mental connections between spatial locations and referents) is only one type of construction, which is not even very frequent in signed language utterances due to the fact that the verbs involved are often ditransitive verbs. It seems as if this verb class consists mostly of verbs conceptualizing some kind of either concrete or metaphorical transfer, where the movement direction resembles the path of the transfer. In fact the directional movement in these verbs moves from the location related to the A towards the location related to the indirect "object", not the O. I have never seen a directional verb in the signed languages I have looked at that had a movement towards the O exclusively, but there are some verbs that can only be moved away from the spatial location related to the A, something which often involves another construction: surrogate blends. I wouldn't call that agreement though. <BR> <BR> <BR>All the best<BR> <BR>Sonja<BR> <BR> <BR>Prof. Sonja Erlenkamp<BR>University College of Sør-Trøndelag<BR>Department of teacher - and sign language education<BR>2004 Trondheim<BR>Norway<BR> <BR>> Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:23:57 +0100<BR>> From: uzeshan@UCLAN.AC.UK<BR>> Subject: Re: O-only agreement<BR>> To: LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<BR>> <BR>> Hi, though this is only partially what you are looking for, the majority of sign languages have the following agreement patterns:<BR>> <BR>> - no agreement with intransitive S<BR>> - agreement with both A and O for some transitive verbs<BR>> - agreement with O only for some other transitive verbs<BR>> <BR>> Interestingly, agreement with A only in transitive verbs does not occur.<BR>> <BR>> Verb agreement with transitive verbs is also known as "directionality" in sign linguistics (due to the agreement being shown by the direction of the hand movement during production of the verb).<BR>> <BR>> Ulrike<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> Prof. Ulrike Zeshan<BR>> Director, International Centre for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies<BR>> Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences<BR>> Livesey House, LH212<BR>> University of Central Lancashire<BR>> Preston PR12HE, UK<BR>> uzeshan@uclan.ac.uk<BR>> Ph. +44-1772-893104<BR>> <BR>> >>> peterarkadiev <peterarkadiev@YANDEX.RU> 19/09/09 2:51 PM >>><BR>> Dear typologists,<BR>> <BR>> while Paul Hopper has come up with an example of A-only agreement in Malay (see references below), I ask a follow-up question concerning the mirror-image situation: are there any languages where the verb would agree exclusively with the transitive O (patient, undergoer, direct object), but neither with the transitive A nor with the intransitive S?<BR>> <BR>> Many thanks and best wishes,<BR>> <BR>> Peter Arkadiev<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> Paul J. Hopper, 1987 Stability and change in VN/NV Alternating Languages:<BR>> A study in pragmatics and linguistic typology. In M. Bertuccelli Papi and<BR>> J.Verscheuren, eds., The Pragmatic Perspective, 455-476. Amsterdam: John<BR>> Benjamins.<BR>> <BR>> Paul J. Hopper, 1983 Ergative, passive, and active in Malay narrative<BR>> discourse. In F. Klein-Andreu, ed., Discourse Perspectives on Syntax,<BR>> 64-87. New York: Academic Press.<BR><BR>
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<P></X-SIGSEP><FONT size=1>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><BR>Dan I. Slobin<BR>Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics<BR><BR>Department of Psychology email: slobin@berkeley.edu<BR>3210 Tolman #1650 phone (Dept): 1-510-642-5292<BR>University of California phone (home): 1-510-848-1769<BR>Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA fax: 1-510-642-5293<BR><A href="http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/dslobin.html" eudora="autourl">http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/dslobin.html<BR></A>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><BR> <BR></FONT></P></BODY></HTML>