agreement of indicating verbs?

[Ronnie Wilbur]

Someone made the comment earlier that you have to be willing to take a
historical perspective on this issue.  I don't mind that approach for
understanding the possioble sources of gramaticized things like brow raise
(let's face it folks, where else do you think they would come from?).
HOwever, I think it is extremely misleading to suggest (and not everyone
has, so take this as a general comment) that for example, brow raise as it
is used in the wh-clefts (formerly called 'rhetorical questions') has any
remote connection to 'affective' functions in modern-day ASL.  And THAT'S
where I feel we need to be careful - I think it is fine to follow Sherman's
suggestion that we leave the boundary fuzzy - the analogy has been made to
the atmosphere, where it is very hard to define where it ends, yet it is
clear that you are either in the atmosphere or out of it except in the
boundary area.  I would say that for my synchronic work on the non-manuals,
including brow raise, eyeblink, body leans, negative headshake, and head
nods, I am clearly on one side of the boundary - the one that says that it's
interesting to me to know where these non-manuals may have come from, and I
definitely enjoyed reading Terry Janzen's master's thesis on FINISH, but for
my own work, these are tangential points.

My linguistic analysis is based on how these things function in the language
now (and I think this is what Franz Dotter was originally getting at).  For
example, the brow raise in wh-clefts are different from brow raises in, say,
rhetorical wh-questions (or echo questions).  For one thing, when you embed
these two constructions, the rhetorical loses its brow raise and gets a
proper wh-question face, while the wh-cleft keeps its brow raise even under
embedding.

 People who have worked on verb agreement as morphological processes are
similarly concerned with demonstrating synchronic behavior - if these have
arisen from merging non-linguistic into linguistic, so be it.  Indeed, in
one of my studies I have claimed to have found one such change in progress -
the cliticization of sentence-final PT to the preceding verb behaving as a
unit when the verb takes an experiencer subject (which ASL verbs don't agree
with - see Janis's thesis).  It looks like a verb+PT/marker is developing
for expereincer subjects, in defiiance of the fact that not only don't ASL
verbs agree with the expereincer subjects, but also that ASL verbs don't
agree with subjects unless they also agree with their objects, and finally
that when ASl verbs do agree with their subjects the agreement marking is
prefixed, not suffixed.

 So sure, these things grammaticize, but that is not the end of the
discussion, and for some of us, we take it as given that these forms arose
somehow and our discussion focuses on what the structural behaviors and
constraints are that exist in the current state of hte language.

And I might add, it's not fear of iconicity at all - there's been plenty of
work on the role of iconicity in ASL and other signed languages - my 1987
book had a whole section on the topic.  It's simply that iconicity is not a
linguistic explanation for synchronic behavior any more than historical
development is.  So carefully define the question you want to answer and the
relevant data and method should become obvious.

Here's a good place for a plug -- the new journal Sign Language and
Linguistics has a paper in the next issue by Don Grushkin on the
metaphorical nature of signs for ANGER in ASL (non-linguistic domain into
linguistic domain) and a paper by Judy Reilly and Diane Anderson on the
acquisition of grammatical and adverbial facial expression compared to
affective facial expression; in the last issue there was a paper by Carol
Padden on the treatment of fingerspelling and other fringe loan signs in the
ASL lexicon and a paper by Irit Meir on backwards verbs in Israeli Sign
Language. Visit www.jb-hag.com for more info.  I mention these papers
because they represent both sides of this debate.

Ronnie
Ronnie Wilbur, Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics                  wilbur at omni.cc.purdue.edu
ASL Linguistics Research Laboratory                             (765) 494-3822
Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics and                    fax (765) 494-0771
        Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1353