modifiability of indicating verbs
I.Zwitserlood
I.Zwitserlood at let.ru.nl
Thu Jan 10 08:06:23 UTC 2008
Hi Louise and all,
These are extremely interesting data! If I
remember correctly, Adam Schembri also indicated
at his Cologne talk that the agreement mostly
appeared to be with 1st person, and that "3rd to
3rd" person occurred far less. (If you have any
statistics on that, I'd be happy to know). And I
completely agree with you that more work,
especially on spontaneous data, will learn us a
lot more about the agreement properties of SL
verbs. For that, of course, such data should be
available. B.t.w. For those who are interested in
setting up a SL corpus, there will be a workshop
on this topic on June 1st in Marrakech (Morocco).
See http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec2008/cfp.html.
Cheers,
Inge
At 03:40 10-1-2008, you wrote:
>Hi Robin and all,
>
> > Overall- my recollection of the data we
> collected is that plain verbs which could be
> displaced in space (i.e., are not are produced
> on the body) ARE with (fairly) high frequency.
>
>Actually, as part of my post-doc into the use of
>space in Auslan, we (Trevor Johnston, Adam
>Schembri, several research assistants and I)
>have annotated and analysed about 70 texts in
>Elan. As Adam Schembri said, we defined these
>verbs that could be located in space (but do not
>either move through space or use a change of
>orientation meaningfully) as locatable
>indicating verbs (such as the Auslan verb HAVE
>which is a clench of the fist, usually in front
>of the body). We defined directional indicating
>verbs as those verbs that have a beginning and
>ending location or orientation associated with
>agent/source and patient/goal (such as the
>Auslan sign SAY/TELL – a finger from mouth to
>another location - or LOOK –two fingers from
>next to the eye to another location. And plain
>verbs were body anchored in some way and unable
>to be either moved through space or located in
>space (such as the sign for EAT in Auslan (hand
>to mouth), or LOVE (arms across body hugging
>oneself). About a quarter of the data were plain
>verbs (body anchored in some way and unable to
>be located in space), and a quarter were
>depicting verbs (classifier signs,
>polycomponential signs etc etc), and half were indicating verbs.
>
>In an analysis of the first 50 texts (which
>included 8, 534 tokens or signs and gestures
>(and about 40,000 individual annotations)), we
>found that 19 - 33% of locatable indicating
>verbs were actually located in space or modified
>in some way (depending on different criteria for
>recognising a modification). Also 53 to 70% of
>directional signs were actually modified. So
>indeed, there were MANY instances of verbs which
>COULD be modified in some way that were not.
>Further, approximately half of the examples of
>verbs that were modified were just 10 frequently
>occurring verbs. So many modifiable verbs modified hardly at all or never.
>
>This is a fascinating area that obviously needs
>a lot more work on large numbers of naturally
>occurring texts. We are still increasing the
>number of annotated texts and looking at various
>factors which might influence the spatial modification.
>
>Louise
>
>
>--
>Dr Louise de Beuzeville BA(hons) GradDipEd MspecEd(Deafness) PhD
>Signed Languages & Linguistics
>___________________________________________________________
>Department of Linguistics, C3B 401
>Macquarie University, Sydney
>NSW Australia 2109
>
>phone: +61 (0)2 9850 8635
>fax: +61 (0)2 9850 9199
>mobile: +61 (0)433 704 794
>email: louise.debeuzeville at ling.mq.edu.au
>
>
>
>On 10/1/08 1:52 AM, "Robin Thompson" <robin.thompson at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>For my dissertation work (with Karen Emmorey) we
>looked at eye gaze occurring with plain verbs as
>well as eye gaze with verbs that move in space
>to indicate location (spatial verbs) or person
>(agreeing verbs). We found that for plain verbs
>eye gaze was not directed toward locations
>associated with referents whereas for agreeing and spatial verbs it was.
>Crucially- this was true whether or not the
>plain verb was spatially modified-- This (at a
>minimum) suggests that the two types of
>movement/spatial displacement are not the same.
>If you want to think of it in terms of
>morphemes, Carol Padden suggested that plain
>verbs that indicated either the subject or
>object (e.g., WANT produced on the right could
>mean "She wants something" , or "Someone want
>that thing" -it is ambiguous ) were occurring with clitics.
>
>Overall- my recollection of the data we
>collected is that plain verbs which could be
>displaced in space (i.e., are not are produced
>on the body) ARE with (fairly) high frequency.
>
>Happy New Year to all!
>Robin
>
>
>Robin Thompson, Ph.D.
>Research Fellow
>Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL)
>University College London
>49 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
>Web: www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk <http://www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk>
>robin.thompson at ucl.ac.uk
>
>
>
>
>On 9 Jan 2008, at 13:56, Bencie Woll wrote:
>
>
>In the following paper we discuss optionality in
>relation to agreement in the input to children
>acquiring BSL as a first language. Morgan G,
>Barrière I, & Woll B (2006) The influence of
>typology and modality on the acquisition of language. First Language 26: 19-43.
>
>
>
>Bencie Woll, BA, MA, PhD
> Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies
> Director, UCL DCAL Research Centre
> 49 Gordon Square
> London WC1H 0PD
> +44 20 7679 8670 (voice)
> +44 20 7679 8691 (fax)
> +44 20 7679 8693 (textphone/minicom)
> www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk <http://www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>----------
>From: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
>[<mailto:slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu]>mailto:slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu]
>On Behalf Of I.Zwitserlood
> Sent: 09 January 2008 08:26
> To: A list for linguists interested in signed languages
> Subject: Re: [SLLING-L] Plain verbs in signed languages
>
>
>Dear Scholastica,
>
> Uou touch on an important issue here. It seems
> as if "plain verbs" in a sign language are
> taken to be a fixed group of verbs that never
> show any agreement, whereas "agreement verbs"
> do show agreement and "spatial verbs" also show
> agreement, though in a different way from
> agreement verbs. However, it is also observed
> that verbs that are reported (e.g. in the
> literature or dictionaries) to be "agreement
> verbs" are used without showing agreement (viz.
> there is a lot of variability in the use of
> agreement). E.g. In discourses in Sign Language
> of the Netherlands (NGT) we sometimes see verbs
> that can show agreement, used without agreement
> or only carrying a subset of the possible
> agreement markers. Sometimes they are
> accompanied by an auxiliary carrying the
> agreement marking, but not always. Also we see
> that verbs that are reported to be "plain
> verbs" sometimes do show agreement. It is by no
> means clear when, how and why the agreement
> marking varies, no systematic studies have been
> done on NGT so far. During the CISLR conference
> in Cologne last year Diane Lillo-Martin and
> Adam Schembri also report unexpected agreement
> patterns in ASL (children) and Auslan (adults), respectively.
> I'm not sure whether this answers your
> question, but I think it is important to notice
> that the issue of sign language agreement is by
> no means clear yet and needs a lot more study. As you plan to do. Good luck!
>
> Inge Zwitserlood
> Radboud University Nijmegen
>
>
> At 17:53 8-1-2008, you wrote:
>
>
>Hi everyone,
>
> I think I need to rephrase my question. Sorry
> for any misunderstandings caused.
>
> I tried to adopt Padden's (1983, 1988) verb
> classification for my HKSL data. Yet I want to
> clarify the notion plain verbs. I wonder if
> what have been called plain verbs may not be
> really "plain" in terms of morphology (e.g.
> verb agreement, aspect, etc) when more studies
> are done on ASL and other signed languages.
>
> Did anyone observe that the so-called plain
> verbs may actually be marked with morphemes in signed languages?
>
> Scholastica
>
> "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
>"Scholastica" (Nini Hoiting?) wrote:
>#I am a research student who works on Hong Kong Sign Language. My focus of
>#study is verbs. I would like to confirm if plain verbs are generally
>#unmarked for verb agreement and spatial locations.
>Dan Slobin answered:
>#By defnition, a "plain verb" is one that cannot move in space, and so it
>#cannot mark agreement and spatial locations in itself. But in many sign
>#languages (including Sign Language of the Netherlands, Taiwanese Sign
>#Language, and others), there are "auxiliary" verbs that accompany a "plain"
>#verb. Such accompanying verbs do move in space to indicate relations such
>#as source-goal, agent-patient, and so forth.
>Denise Wetzler added:
>#In American Sign Language, verbs move. The movement itself contains a great
>#amount of information. If want to show that I will go from my house to the
>#bank and then to the library, these three locations are first established in
>#the signing space. How I sign the verb 'go-to' then will show where I
>#started from; went to; and where I ended up. [...]
>
>
>It's essential to know what Scholastica means by
>"plain verb". Dan is evidently
>assuming that S. has the same definition for it that he does.
>A sign that does not move in space can nevertheless mark agreement with a
>spatial location, by its orientation and
>possibly its location as well. Example:
>ASL PITY (open-8 handshape, palm toward object, middle finger repeatedly
>bending).
>Clarification of Denise's answer: in ASL, *many*
>verbs move [in space], but by
>no means all of them.
>-- Mark A. Mandel
>Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
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