a Linguistics of ASL question -- grammar

[Grushkin, Donald A]

Thanks for the response, Susan.  

If I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that in "EAT-FINISH", the subject (me) is implied or "understood", so the PRO.1 is a copy of the implied subject?
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From: linguists interested in signed languages [SLLING-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACC.EDU] On Behalf Of Fischer Susan [susan.fischer at RIT.EDU]
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2011 10:13 AM
To: SLLING-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACC.EDU
Subject: Re: a Linguistics of ASL question -- grammar

Sentences like that could be analyzed as an example of subject pronoun copy (discussed by Padden), since first person subject is often zero, and as far as I can tell, has no relation to the presence of FINISH.   It would be restricted to unstressed pronouns (you couldn't substitute MYSELF for IX1, for example).  I actually talked about a broader category of post-sentential tags in my very old paper on word order in ASL (Sign language and linguistic universals, recently reprinted in SLL), though I didn't call them that.  They have to be unstressed.  Note also that a language like Japanese, which is strictly verb-final and more generally head-final, permits postposed topics (without the topic marker wa) under the same circumstances, e.g.,

baka    da nee,      watasi  (falling intonation, low stress)
dumb   is  right?   me
I'm sure dumb, aren't I.

SDF

Susan D. Fischer
Susan.Fischer at rit.edu<mailto:Susan.Fischer at rit.edu>

Center for Research on Language
UCSD



On Mar 4, 2011, at 9:39 AM, Grushkin, Donald A wrote:

Teaching ASL Linguistics again.  In Linguistics of ASL (textbook by Valli, Lucas & Mulrooney), it says that in simple sentences with plain intransitive verbs, it is not possible to use VS (Verb Subject) structure.  A couple of students pointed out that one can sign EAT-FINISH PRO.1, or RUN-FINISH PRO.1.  On the face of it, these do seem to be Verb Subject structures.  I hypothesized that the completive FINISH might be changing the structure of the sentence so the rule is not violated.  However, I'd like to check with you, the real linguistics experts on this.

--Don Grushkin