Fwd: Nouns & Verbs

[Victor Brown]

Sonja Erlenkamp wrote:

> Dear Victor,
> I tried to send this to the Slling-list, but it didn't work. Would you mind
> forwarding it?
> Thanks a lot :)
> Sonja
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I'm following your discussion about noun-verb-pairs. I'm very interested in
> this issue because I'm doing my Ph.D. on it (noun-verb-distinction in
> German Sign Language). Maybe I didn't get all your comments so let me ask
> some questions:
>
> 1. What is your definition for the terms NOUN and VERB?
>
> In my opinion these are not selv understood categories. They have different
> forms and functions in the languages of the world.
> What are we thinking about when we're talking about nouns and verbs in sign
> languages? Categories we know from english, german ...?
>
> 2. What are the parameters you'd like to analyse parts of speech in sign
> languages with?
> Formal - functional - semantical - all together?
>
> In my opinion are the categories noun and verb not necessarily important
> categories in all languages. Broschart (1997) claims for example that there
> is no noun-verb-distinction in Tongan (a language spoken in the south
> pacific).
> (I propose that the same is true for German Sign Language. In German Sign
> Language you have two verb classes but no noun class (all items not being
> verbs are multifunctional))
>
> >>Adam Schembri wrote:
> >My impression of the claims by Supalla & Newport is that the noun-verb
> >distinction applies to only a subset of lexical items in the language.
> >Their heading on p.99 of the article "How many seats in a chair? The
> >derivation of nouns and verbs in American Sign Language" in Siple, 1978
> >is: "Distinctions between concrete nouns and verbs in ASL". In a
> >footnote on p.100, they explain that "...the regularities described here
> >seem to apply primarily to CONCRETE nouns and verbs".
>
> My idea about this subset of lexical items is that Supalla$Newport
> described the class of classifier verbs. With classifier verbs you always
> have movement modification. But I'm not familiar enough with ASL. What
> about all the non-concrete lexical
> items? Is there any movement modification?
> Another phenomenon described by Supalla&Newport is that movement
> specification is lost when the items are produced in a context. May be the
> isolated forms they've described are more than isolated forms?
>
> For example:
>
> Supalla&Newport described the difference between FLY and PLANE. But as they
> mentioned is the lexical item FLY a description of a movement of the PLANE.
> May be there is no lexical item FLY, but an item for
> SOMETHING.LIKE.A.PLANE-IS.MOVING (a classifier verb)? And the item PLANE is
> a description of a plane that is not moving? Than this is not the problem
> of a noun-verb-distiction but of a classifier-classifier.verb-distinction.
> This ist true for German Sign Language, but - as already mentioned - I
> don't know how it looks like in ASL.
>
> Sonja Erlenkamp
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
> Sonja Erlenkamp
> Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet
> Seminar fuer Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
> Leibnizstr.10
> 24118 KIEL
> GERMANY
> email: soso at asta.uni-kiel.de