modifiability of indicating verbs

[Ulrike Zeshan]

dcogill wrote:

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.
YES I THINK THERE IS SOMETHING TO IT, AND IN FACT, THE QUESTION MAY BE
PUT THE OTHER WAY ROUND: NOT WHETHER WANT AND BUY ETC ARE VERBS, BUT WHY
A LOT OF OTHER SIGNS THAT BEHAVE SIMILARLY ARE NOT ALSO CONSIDERED
VERBS.

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?
 
MAYBE YOU ARE THINKING OF THE SWAHILI-TYPE CLASS MARKERS THAT ARE
FAMOUS FOR GOING ON MANY DIFFERENT CONSTITUENTS, SO YOU OFTEN HAVE
SEVERAL IDENTICAL ONES IN THE SAME SENTENCE. (?)
 
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?
I HAVE A PAPER BY WALDEMAR SCHWAGER WHERE AGREEMENT IS TREATED AS
GENUINELY SPATIAL, NOT AS MARKING PERSON/ SEMANTIC ROLES / GRAMMATICAL
RELATIONS. IT IS NOT PUBLISHED THOUGH AND IS IN GERMAN...
 
IF WE DO NOT INVOKE GRAMMAR THOUGH, HOW DO WE ACCOUNT FOR THE
LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC PATTERNS AND PARTICULARITIES WE FIND? 
 
Ulrike
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
Prof. Ulrike Zeshan
Director, International Centre for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Livesey House, LH212
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR12HE, UK
uzeshan at uclan.ac.uk 
Ph. +44-1772-893104
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