agreement of indicating verbs?

[B.Woll]

>>From Gary Morgan via Bencie Woll:

Thanks Adam Schembri for the original prompt for discussion,
During Scott Liddel's TISLR talk a lot of things came to me
regarding the differences between an agreement verb in a sign
language and a gesture produced by a non-signer.  Although from a
formational perspective they may look the same, as linguists or
psychologists we have to go deeper than this.  I will try to outline
some of these in no order of importance. They overlap with those
points Rachel Mayberry made at the end of Scott Liddel's talk at
TISLR.

There is work from Elissa  Newport (1) which describes the
differences between native signers (exposure to sign as a young
child) and late signers (first exposure as an older child or young
adult) in the use of verb morphology.  Learning sign late doesn't
stop you from having a high level of competency but having early
exposure gives you an advantage in the productivity of the
morphological system.  Non-linguistic gesture is equally
accessible to both populations of signers, yet it is the native
signers who have most linguistic competence with signs because
they have applied a child-orientated linguistic analysis to the input.
This work was supported by Rachel Mayberry's claim (2) that any
language input during infancy signed or spoken will make a
difference in the final competence of the signer.  Another
compelling argument comes from Judy Kegl's description of the
difference between LSN and ISN (Nicaraguan Sign Languages)
signers in their use of all aspects of verb and noun morphology
(3).  Again if verb morphology is based on non-linguistic information
why would there be a difference in these populations?

Strong evidence for the linguistic nature of agreement verbs comes
from the over-generalisations of verb argument structure young
children make in their spontaneous signing.  Bellugi et al (4)
reported on non-adult like use of verb inflections in ASL  10 years
ago.

A more recent example comes from British Sign Language (5).
One group of BSL agreement verbs are produced in two parts.  The
first part of the verb-pair moves away from the signer towards a
location indexed previously as a third person, the second part of
the pair moves back onto the signer's own body.  An example
utterance would be BOY WASH-OUT GIRL WASH-FACE 'the
boy washes the girl's face'.  Adult native signers always indicate in
the first verb what the action is and in the second verb, what the
affected body part is, and without fail they appear in this order.
You 'could' say this is entirely gesture-based as it is an enactment
of the action using surrogates and indicating gestures.  However
looking at the child BSL data you get a different picture.  Children
from 3 to 4 years old reverse the order of the verb pairs painting
their own faces first then painting a third person in a location in
from or to the side of them. Example *BOY WASH-FACE WASH-
OUT 'the boy washed, washed him'. They do this at an age where
they show good comprehension of this structure in adult-produced
utterances.

If they were approaching verb morphology based on non-linguistic
information, a reversal of this type is difficult to explain as it would
represent  a gesture schema they will never have seen in their
environment (ie. non-iconic).  Other evidence for the linguistic
underpinning to agreement verbs comes from signers who have
suffered brain injury,  especially the types of dissociations reported
by Poisner, Kegl and colleagues (6).

The above studies suggest therefore that although a sign may have
formational similarities to a non-linguistic gesture it hasn't
necessarily the same underlying representation in the mind of the
user.

(1) Newport, E. (1990). Maturational constraints on language
learning. Cognitive Science 14, 11-28
(2) Mayberry, R.I. (1993). First language acquisition after child-
hood differs from second-language acquisition: The case of
American Sign Language. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research
36, 1258-1270
(3) Kegl, J. (1994). The Nicaraguan Sign Language project: an
overview. Signpost, 24-31
(4) Bellugi, U., van Hoek, L., Lillo-Martin, D. & O'Grady, L. (1989).
The acquisition of syntax and space in young deaf signers. In K.
Mogford-Bevan & D. Bishop (Eds.), Language development in
exceptional circumstances. Cambridge: L.E.A.
(5) Poizner, H. & Kegl, J. (1992). The neural basis of language and
motor behaviour: Evidence from American Sign Language.
Aphasiology 6, 219-256
(6) Morgan, G., Herman, R. & Woll, B. (1999). Event packaging in
British Sign Language: The development of serial verb
constructions. Paper to be presented at the IASCL congress, San
Sebastian, Spain, July 1999.






-------
Gary Morgan
Dept of Linguistics, UCL, London
tel: 0171 4193162 (voice/text)
fax: 0171 3834108



Bencie Woll
b.woll at city.ac.uk
Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies
City University, Northampton Square
London EC1V 0HB, UK
Tel: +44 (0)171 477 8354 (voice) +44 (0)171 477 8314 (text)
Fax: +44 (0)171 477 8577 or 8354