agreement or indicating verbs

[Ulrike Zeshan]

Dear all,

we are having an interesting discussion here. For example, I would like
very much to know more about that 'verb+PT'-construction that Ronnie Wilbur
mentioned. I just couldn't figure out what PT means, so could you please
elaborate on that a little more, or give us a reference if there is one?

Since there have been some words of caution about defining questions and
drawing boundaries etc., let me throw in my own word of caution here: we
should always keep in mind that we are speaking of particular individual
sign languages and not about 'the sign languages' in general (by which I am
not saying that any of you made any overgeneralizing statements). It might
well be that constructions are more adequately described as 'agreement
verbs' in one sign language but as 'indicating verbs' in another sign
language (apart from the fact that the class of verbs itself may be
different in different sign languages in terms of the size of the class and
its properties, but I won't go into that here). For example, I could
imagine that in some sign language all directional predicates would have a
distinct imaginary body part (at varying heights) that they are directed
to, but that in another sign languages there would only be one general
location (always at the same height) to direct a sign to.

The second caution is this: even though as linguists we are always happy to
find regularity in language, we shouldn't forget that there is also a lot
of irregularity around. In particular, if you work with naturally produced
texts, I predict you would find more irregularity than you like to find (at
least, that's what happens to me all the time). As grammatical structures
always keep evolving, changing, becoming obsolete etc., there naturally is
a lot of irregularity and variation. And it is precisely in these
intermediate stages where the historical development (and iconicity, if it
is a factor in the historical development) can be useful to explain current
irregularities. And again, for a given construction that is comparable
across different sign languages, it is not necessarily the case that they
are both at the same stage in their history. (For example, I believe that
"handle" classifier constructions are less grammaticalized in IPSL than in
ASL or DGS.)

Best to all,

Ulrike Zeshan
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
The Australian National University