Antw: Agreement or indicating verbs?

[Franz Dotter]

Dear colleagues!

I think this is really an interesting question, but the in discussing it we must look on the the basically different perspectives on sign language which (can) underlie different 'solutions':
1. Perspective (I would think that this one is Lidell's):
Sign language merges with non-linguistic features in a very complicated way during its production (that means: there exist languages, i.e. the signed ones, which are produced in an intricate mix of linguistic and non-linguistic elements.
2. Perspective (that is mine):
Sign languages are like other (spoken) languages. That means, that they use elements of 'predecessor systems' (e.g. gestures for signed; intonational elements for spoken languages), but all these elements undergo a qualitative change insofar as they are 'practically defined' by the users as linguistic elements. Consequence: We should label (almost?) all elements occuring in spoken/signed language production as 'linguistic'; a language mixing linguistic and non-linguistic elements systematically being a very strange thing.

Last notice: I thought I would understand the concept of 'blending', coming from Fauconnier and others. But in concerning sign languages I find a discussion and usage of blending I cannot come clear with. But I suspice that this (pardon me) rather weird understanding of blending ('blending exists everywhere') has as one of its consequences the distinction of linguistic and non-linguistic elements argued for by Scott Liddell. Perhaps someone can explain this sort of (in my eyes) metaphorical extension of 'blending'?

Franz Dotter

University of Klagenfurt
Research Center for Sign Language and Communication of the Hearing Impaired
(of the Faculty for Cultural Sciences at the Department of Linguistics and Computational Linguistics)
Funded by: Bundessozialamt Kaernten, European Social Fund
Head: Franz Dotter
Collaborators: Elisabeth Bergmeister (deaf), Marlene Hilzensauer, Klaudia Krammer, Andrea Skant, Ingeborg Okorn (deaf), Manuela Hobel (deaf)
Homepage: http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/fzgs
Deaf server (in German): http://deaf.uni-klu.ac.at

>>> "Adam Schembri" <acschembri at hotmail.com> 05/19 7:54  >>>
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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