Agreement or indicating verbs?

[Adam Schembri]

At the recent TISLR conference in Washington D.C., I missed the paper by
Scott Liddell "Indicating verbs: Pointing away from agreement" in which he
argued that agreement verbs are more appropriately known as "indicating
verbs" because the use of space in these signs is the product of some fusion
of a linguistic sign with a deictic gesture (and thus loci are not morphemic
elements and cannot strictly speaking been seen as inflections for
agreement). His argument strikes me as fairly persuasive and full of
enormous implications for our understanding of signed languages, but I
believe there was some heated discussion after his presentation in which
many of those present took issue with these claims. Would anyone who was
there, or who feels strongly about Liddell's analysis of agreement verbs and
the use of space, care to outline what some of the counter-arguments to this
proposal might be? Is there any published work which responds to Liddell?

Adam

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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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