agreement of indicating verbs?

[Ulrike Zeshan]

Dear everybody,

since I was present at this presentation, I may say a few words about this
issue, even though I couldn't follow the more phonological side of the
argumentation due to my problematic relationship with phonology in general.
In  particular, if I remember it correctly, there was a repeated claim that
there is no phonological correlate of agreement, when I had always
understood the loci to be the ponological side of it...

Be that as it may, I believe that part of the reason why the heated debate
happened is that it is still always seen as a threat to the linguistic
status of sign languages if you try to describe them in terms of
pantomimic, iconic and gestural elements. And I do believe that we are in a
position nowadays to look at these things in a more relaxed way and stop
being scared of iconicity issues. Iconicity is a good thing for a language
to do, and if you have the possibility to be iconic it would be quite
stupid not to use it. There is plenty of iconicity in spoken languages, in
particular in languages that never had a written form. Anyone who has ever
looked at ideophonic or reduplicative patterns as they happen in some
African, South American and Asian spoken languages can observe that. It's
only that these things don't happen a lot in European written languages, so
if you compare sign languages to a written European language (which is in a
way like comparing apples with pears), sign languages may seem less
'linguistic'. They don't seem less linguistic at all if you compare them
with spoken discourse or with languages that have no written tradition.

But to get back to the main topic again. I would like to see this question
in terms of a grammaticalization framework. Grammaticalization is basically
about how grammar develops out of non-grammar. For example, inflectional
endings can develop out of independent words that get fused with another
word and loose their independent status. Lots of completive aspect
morphemes have developed from a word meaning 'finish'. Typically, the
grammatical morpheme retains some characteristics of the word it developed
from. In signed languages, it seems that grammar does not only develop from
separate words (which are already linguistic units un the first place) but
also from non-linguistic sources. For example, James McFarlane wrote a
paper about how the "raised eyebrows" feature used in questions,
topicalization etc. developed from a non-linguistic "facial affect". In the
same way, agreement/indicating verbs are obviously related to a
non-linguistic pointing gesture, i.e. the source of this grammatical
construction is pointing. Therefore, it is quite natural that these verbs
should have characteristics of both non-linguistic pointing and linguistic
agreement. This could maybe reconcile the two opposing views that Franz
Dotter talked about in his message. In order for this position to make
sense you must of course assume a diachronic perspective.

Maybe Scott Liddell should add something to this discussion himself...?

Best to all of you,


Ulrike Zeshan
Research Centre for Linguistic Typology
The Australian National University