Nouns & Verbs

[Adam Schembri]

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". It seems, however,
that some people writing about ASL research have misinterpreted the
extent of the claims made by Supalla & Newport. I've sometimes read that
all lexical items are nominalised by means of a repeated, restrained
movement, but this is not the claim that Supalla & Newport are making.
It is also worth noting that probably not ALL native ASL signers make
the distinction Supalla & Newport describe for ALL of the noun-verb
pairs listed in their paper (Jenny Singleton, personal communication).

I'm currently undertaking research with native signers of Auslan (the
preliminary findings were presented at TISLR 98) that shows a similar
distinction occurs in Auslan (Australian Sign Language), although the
movement difference often consists simply of a restrained movement for
nouns vs continuous movement for verbs. Only a subset of potential
noun-verb pairs consistently show repeated movement for the noun, and
not for all native signers of Auslan. The reduplication in the noun
appears also to be context sensitive, and processes of deletion in
connected signing often result in a loss of the repeated movement for a
nominal that might otherwise have it.

Another difference we have found between the nouns and verbs in
noun-verb pairs is the relatively complementary distribution of
non-manual adverbs such as "th" and "mm" for the verbs and of mouth
patterns related to equivalent English lexical items in nouns (we found
roughly 75% of all nouns in our data were accompanied by English
mouthing vs 19% of verbs).

Adam Schembri
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Adam Schembri
Renwick College
Private Bag 29
Parramatta NSW
2124 AUSTRALIA
Ph (voice/TTY): (61 2) 9872 0303
Fax: (61 2) 9873 1614





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