Nouns & Verbs

[jmacfarl at UNM.EDU]

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Robert Ingram 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.

Robert, this is a valid question.  I don't know whether or not these
verbs can be nominalized in ASL or not, I don't really trust my
intuitions as a non-native signer.

As Don Newkirk pointed out, there may be slight modulations in form
that I am overlooking such as with PLAN or the manner of movement
is "restrained" in the nominalization (as Don said).

My suspicion is that you are RIGHT, and that these verbs rarely
appear as nouns - i.e. YOUR BELIEF WHAT?  vs. YOU BELIEVE
WHAT?  One would have to do some actual discourse analysis of
native signers to tackle that question.

Nonetheless, people do say that forms such as BELIEF/BELIEVE
exist in ASL and that there is no difference in form (Humphries and
Padden "Learning American Sign Language").

My motive for asking the question was as follows:

1)  If people do feel that these types of N/V pairs commonly occur in
     ASL, what are they?

2)  To examine ALL N/V pairs in ASL (homphonous or not) and try
        to reconcile them with Langacker's (1987) analysis of Nouns
        and Verbs (Language 63).

not to make a definitive statement as to whether these forms occur
in ASL.

Thanks,






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James MacFarlane
University of New Mexico
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