Nouns & Verbs

[Don E. Newkirk]

The picture is a lot more complicated than VERB-single/NOUN-repeated.  Even
stativized verbs, which have repetition in Citation Form, and usually have
non-repeated punctual siblings, show a difference in form from some
nominalizations derived from them: manner of movement is "restrained" in
the nominalization.  This is most apparent in the first example below:
PLAN.  The C.F. verb has a large, repeated movement, while the noun has a
shortened movement;  and while the larger movements in the verb tend to be
displaced toward the ipsilateral on each repetition, the shorter movements
in the noun show much less, or even no, displacement.  (Other examples like
PLAN include RIDE-A-BICYCLE/BICYCLE, SWEEP/BROOM; Supalla and Newport have
many more.)

LIVE (the verb), in one of its neutral-handshape forms still used in a lot
of dialects (with an 'A' handshape), has a repeated nominalization:
ADDRESS.  The fact that there is apparent homophony in the pair LIVE/LIFE
may reflect some kind of reluctance to nominalize an initialized sign; and
the fact that a repeated form of LIVE with 'L' handshape, meaning "alive",
is alive and well as an adjectival predicate, especially where contrast or
emphasis is required, might discourage a specific nominalization where
there is already another derivative.

It is quite certain from syntactic analysis that there is a noun LIFE that
looks like LIVE most of the time (emphatic stress makes it a two-touch
sign; imperative stress on the verb form doesn't do that); PLAN definitely
has a nominal form distinct from the verb; WISH exists as a noun, and can
be preceded by MY.  THINK and BELIEVE may be examples of verbs that has no
attested nominal relatives, but if I saw either of them used as a noun in a
sentence, I doubt that my first impression would be to attribute the
influence of English to the formulation of the sentence.

It might do ASL linguists a lot of good to pick up an Icelandic or Russian
grammar, study derivational processes, cringe at suppletive paradigms,
agonize over the effects of generation-separated waves of sound-shifts and
regularizations, and then try to make "a pattern" out of the synchronic
language.  Of course, special sociological circumstances have continued to
keep ASL more liquid than Icelandic ever was, and Russian has had some
stabilizing decades since Pushkin, et alii, lovingly began forging a
national language.  My point (finally) is that ASL doesn't have "a
nominalization process", any more than it has a single verb-paradigm.
 Egad, even English, in its inflectional simplicity (-s, -ed, -ing), has
100 'irregular' (nee strong) verbs!

On Monday, February 15, 1999 11:58 AM, Robert Ingram
[SMTP:ingram_b at IX.NETCOM.COM] wrote:
> Are you absolutely sure about this? Is it possible that verbs such as
WISH,
>  PLAN, THINK, BELIEVE, and LIVE, can only be verbs in ASL: i.e., they
have no
>  noun form? Perhaps the "nominalization" of these forms is an influence
from
>  English and not a
> natural characteristic of ASL.
>
> jmacfarl at unm.edu wrote:
>
> > I have some questions for the list regarding Noun/Verb pairs in ASL.
(other
>  signed language examples are welcome too)
> >
> > Much attention has been paid to the double/single movement alternation
between
>  N's and V's in ASL c.f. (Newport & Supalla).
> > I have noticed that there are some Noun/Verb pairs that do not reflect
this
>  alternation, and show no difference in form between the noun and verb.
These
>  might include pairs such as WISH/WISH, PLAN/PLAN, THINK/THOUGHT,
>  BELIEVE/BELIEF, LIVE/LIFE etc.