modifiability of indicating verbs

[dcogill at une.edu.au]

Hi there,

I agree with Adam regarding the verb status of ASL WANT, or Auslan BUY,
but also think Ulrike raises the really interesting point about this
phenomenon of 'pragmatic agreement' as Engeberg-Pedersen (1993) calls it —
that is, this single strategy, placement in overall space, is used to
indicate that there are relationships among a collocation of signs of
pretty much any class.

I have a memory of noting that there are East African languages that have
concord systems that work across word classes. That could be at least
perhaps a bit like this....does anyone know more here?

Anyway, having nodded in the direction of the old king of sign language
linguistics, spoken language precedents, I'd also like to raise the point
that this phenomenon might be better analysed as something completely
different.  Cognitively, I'd suggest that it could quite as likely be a
form of ... hmm. And now, as a linguist trained in analysing communication
using speech-based models, of course I lack a term, a concept, here. A
form of 'bundling'?  Of physically locating symbolic tokens together in a
way that's not drawing on our grammatical systems to encode and decode the
concept 'association', but instead using a genuinely spatial process -
spatial not just at the level of surface form, but at the COGNITIVE level.
Doesn't Scott Liddell suggest something like this in his paper on 'four
forms of agreement'?  Can anyone help out here?

It's this cognitive level that's the interesting level. Well, it's the
cognitive level that controls what body of behaviour and research it is
appropriate to draw on, as a precedent, to understand something. It's the
cognitive level that controls what model is going to comprehensively WORK,
when it comes to trying to model a communicative act, so surely we're all
interested, really, in the cognitive level. If 'pragmatic agreement' is
cognitively the same kind of mechanism as is concord, then linguistic
precedents will work for modelling it, at all levels. If it's underlyingly
an active, online use of spatial association, then a grammatical model
isn't going to work in the long run; rather, models based on the way we
decode physical contiguity are more likely to yield solid results.

I do appreciate that the null hypothesis directs us first to assume no
difference; to first try on the fit of existing models, when we want to
model a new phenomenon. But as someone who works in an area where the null
hypothesis of 'assume signed communication can be modelled in exactly the
same way as speech-based communication' DOESN'T work, I just want to have
my little grizzle here.  Assuming terms like 'agreement' could be evoking
the wrong kind of model.  It constantly points us to look only at
grammatical strategies, that dominate speech-based communication, rather
than also putting as much effort into exploring things like how humans
create and decode associations through spatial contiguity.

Dorothea.



Dr D. Cogill-Koez,
School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences,
University of New England,
Australia.



> Adam Schembri wrote...

> While acknowledging that there's plenty of room for debate about how
"parts of speech" apply to signed languages, I think there are
> grammatical aspects of "locatable" signs such as ASL WANT or BSL/ Auslan
BUY that support their analysis as verbs in sentential
> contexts. For example, these signs can take arguments and thus enter
into syntactic relationships with other signs in the same way as verbs in
spoken languages.
>
>
> On 12 Jan 2008, at 07:44, Ulrike Zeshan wrote:
>
>> The ASL example of WANT mentioned earlier in this example caught my
interest, particularly the ambiguity in the meaning of adding a
location specification. If this is so, then what is the difference between
something like WANT and other signs like HALF, FRIEND,
>> SIBLING, colours or numbers (not necessarily in ASL, but other sign
languages) that can also add a location specification? On the one hand,
having a location specification is not itself something
>> "verbal", and on the other hand, in lots of spoken languages, items
like kinship terms are verbs. In other words, why are "plain verbs" called
"verbs" in the first place, and why are the other signs not "verbs"?
>> Ulrike











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