LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

“Verb Agreement”: a study in its features

Samar Sinha
Assistant Professor, SIkkim University, Gangtok 

There are two well known observations in the study of sign language (henceforth, SL):

1. All SLs exhibit some features of which there are no parallels in spoken languages - 'verb agreement' is one such phenomenon.

2. All SLs show strong cross-linguistic similarities in verb agreement.

 
In SL literature, the onset and the offset of the verb’s path movement between its arguments is regarded as an inflectional process as 'indexic reference’ to 1P, 2P, and 3P; and are claimed to manifest through various phonological manifestations. Aronoff et al. (2005) argues that ‘verb agreement’ in SL is an instance of literal alliterative agreement as found in Wolof, Arapesh and Bainouk. This contradicts (1).

In this study, verb agreement in spoken languages and 'verb agreement' in SL is reexamined with respect to its morphology and syntax drawing examples from spoken languages and particularly from Indian Sign Language (henceforth, ISL), respectively. Further, the study intends to revisit the latter phenomenon in the light of the following characteristics observed in ISL many which are also observed in other sign lanauges too:

(i) Lack of phi-features: The onset and offset of the verb do not exhibit any evidence for person, gender or number ‘agreement’ with the verb.

(ii) ‘Agreement’ is optional: The onset of the verb can be dropped if the noun associated with is topicalised or is a discourse topic. Similarly, both the onset and the offset are dropped where the relative position of the nouns, along with animacy, determines the relationship with the verb.

(iii) Argument drop: Overt arguments of the verb can be elided as well, and the onset and the offset of the verb’s path movement can determine its arguments.

(iv) Adjunct: The offset or the onset marks not only arguments, but adjuncts as well.

(v) Deletion in wh-questions: In content wh-subject and wh-object questions, the verb is in the citation form. However, in a wh-adjunct question, all the overt NPs are as expected and the onset and/or the offset is shown on the verb.

(vi) Additional mechanisms: In the absence of a path component in the verbs as in the case of plain verbs, verb agreement is done by appendage, aphesis and appendix.

Following the decompositional approach, the features involved in the phenomenon in SL and spoken language are decomposed into several projections, from which the meaning of the feature is composed (not necessarily as a f-seq). The study, further, characterise features (as head of the projections) involved in the phenomena of verb agreement in spoken languages and in SL rather than to rely on the term "verb agreement" in its pre-theoretical sense. Finally, study intends to provide feature based explanation to the claim made by  Aronoff et al. (2005) as well as for above mentioned (i – vi) characteristics. 

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