agreement of indicating verbs?

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Fri, 21 May 1999, Ulrike Zeshan wrote:

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

        I checked the list, and if Liddell is subscribed it's not under
his own name.  I was surprised at how many lurkers we have here, though!
There are people on the list from Gallaudet, so he's probably aware of
this discussion.

        I was also at Liddell's talk, and although I think he made the
best argument for his position, I feel that I have a way around it.  As I
see it, Liddell's argument is based on three principles: that ASL is a
language, that languages are systematic, and that gesture is not
systematic.

        He has a very strict notion of the systematicity of language,
though, and there seem to be just too many locations in signing space for
him to consider all of them systematic.  This leads him to say that part
of what has been called ASL is really unsystematic gesture.

        The problem with this argument is that the folks in David
McNeill's lab in Chicago have shown that gesture (and probably all human
activity) is systematic at some level.  In fact, as Jim has hinted, the
only reason we normally draw such a sharp line between language and
gesture is because in spoken languages gesture has a different modality,
and we don't write gesture.

        I would say that we can welcome all the gestures into a big-tent
view of language: they're all a product of the same brain for essentially
the same set of functions.  Some are more productive while others are more
frozen, but this is true of (other aspects of) language as well.

        Now you'll excuse me while I go try and figure out how to make
computers recreate these movements...

--
                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                                Linguistics Department
                                The University of New Mexico
                                grvsmth at unm.edu