agreement of indicating verbs?

[james macfarlane]

On Fri, 21 May 1999, Don & Theresa G wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> >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
> --Donald Grushkin

Hello all,

I feel that Ulrike makes an important point regarding the grammaticization
of gestural or 'non-linguistic' sources in signed languages.  This point
has been made by others as well.  My paper is an extension of two papers
already in existence.  First, Reilly & Bellugi argued that raised eyebrows
were grammaticized from a gestural source in a language acquistion paper
written a while back (maybe 5 years, sorry I dont have the exact
reference) and another paper by Terry Janzen who argues that
yes/no-questions, topic, conditionals, rhetorical questions, etc. are all
grammaticized from a 'communicative questioning gesture.' (this paper is
'in press' I believe).

The paper I presented at TISLR examined 16 signed languages for raised
eyebrows in relation to the grammatical markings discussed by Janzen.
According to the literature and researchers working on these lgs.  All 16
of them grammaticized raised eyebrows to some extent, with one 'possible'
exception.  What this tells us is that gestural and affective behaviors
can be incorporated into a linguistic system.

Where we draw the line between gestures vs. linguistic, if indeed we want
to draw a line, is up for debate.  My advisor, Sherman Wilcox, provides
some pretty good arguments for why we would want to leave the boundaries
for these two elements fuzzy.


John Haiman, speaks of language as a compost heap.  What goes into the top
of the heap can be thought of the raw material that language is made of.
At this point the material is easily identifiable.  When it gets to the
bottom of the heap we are no longer able to detect the original source
material. And, the mechanism that drives this decomposition is frequency
and repetition.  I feel that it is beneficial to view the gesture ->
grammar continuum in this way.  Certainly gestures are the raw materials
of signed languages. Again, how far down the compost heap those gestures
have travelled is the real question here, I think.

James MacFarlane
University of New Mexico