Fwd: Nouns & Verbs

[Adam Schembri]

>> 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?

P.Schachter's article "Parts-of-speech systems" in T.Shopen (Ed.).
(1985) provides a nice overview of the analysis of word classes in
spoken languages based on formal and functional grammatical criteria. It
has been shown in the literature that semantic criteria alone, such as
"a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing" fail to provide an
adequate basis for the noun-verb distinction.

>> 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.

Broschart's claims are interesting, but most language typologists seem
to be of the opinion that the noun-verb distinction is one of the few
apparently universal parts-of-speech distinction. Of course, languages
vary in the morphosyntactic realisation of the noun-verb distinction,
but there appear to a few universal characteristics. Nouns most commonly
act as arguments, and may be specified morphosyntactically for case,
number, class, gender, definiteness (nouns in signed languages appear to
act as arguments and are specified syntactically for number and
definiteness). Verbs can act as predicates and are morphosyntactically
specified for tense, aspect, mood, voice, and polarity (verbs in signed
languages must act as predicates and are specified for aspect etc).

 In German Sign
>> Language you have two verb classes but no noun class (all items not
being
>> verbs are multifunctional))

This is not clear - I would be interested in hearing you explain this. I
don't think that all sign classes other than verbs are multifunctional
(and I can think of many examples of verbs in Auslan that have other
functions). We have a sign, TEACHER, for example that appears to be
basically only a noun, and there are conjunctions such as BUT which
appear also not to be multifunctional.

>> 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.

In ASL, the sign PLANE is produced by many native signers with a
repeated, restrained movement, but when this is produced in the phrase
YOUR PLANE LATE, the movement does not mean that the plane moves with a
repeated, restrained movement but signals that the sign in question is a
noun. In Auslan, there is often a difference in the accompanying
noun-manual signal (this may be true of ASL as well) and quality of the
movement. For PLANE, the movement is not usually repeated, but it may be
a shorter, more restrained movement compared to the verb. It will not
generally occur with a non-manual adverb such as "mm" or "th", but it
may be accompanied by mouthing of the English lexical item "plane". In
both ASL and Auslan, the fact that the form is appears after the
determiner YOUR shows that it is acting as a noun.

I'm not sure I understand your claim that the two forms constitute
examples of a "classifier-classifier.verb-distinction". The difference
for me is that the form SOMETHING.LIKE.A.PLANE-IS.MOVING acts as a
polymorphemic (a.k.a classifier verb), whilst the form glossed as PLANE
is much more like a monomorphemic lexical item.

_____________________________________________________________

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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