Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A Glimpse of the Material
- 2 Motivation and Linguistic Theory
- 3 Iconicity Defined and Demonstrated
- 4 The Analogue-Building Model of Linguistic Iconicity
- 5 Survey of Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Languages
- 6 Metaphor in American Sign Language: The Double Mapping
- 7 Many Metaphors in a Single Sign
- 8 The Vertical Scale as Source Domain
- 9 Verb Agreement Paths in American Sign Language
- 10 Complex Superposition of Metaphors in an American Sign Language Poem
- 11 The Future of Signed-Language Research
- Appendix 1 Glossing Conventions
- Appendix 2 Translation of “The Treasure”
- References
- Index
9 - Verb Agreement Paths in American Sign Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A Glimpse of the Material
- 2 Motivation and Linguistic Theory
- 3 Iconicity Defined and Demonstrated
- 4 The Analogue-Building Model of Linguistic Iconicity
- 5 Survey of Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Languages
- 6 Metaphor in American Sign Language: The Double Mapping
- 7 Many Metaphors in a Single Sign
- 8 The Vertical Scale as Source Domain
- 9 Verb Agreement Paths in American Sign Language
- 10 Complex Superposition of Metaphors in an American Sign Language Poem
- 11 The Future of Signed-Language Research
- Appendix 1 Glossing Conventions
- Appendix 2 Translation of “The Treasure”
- References
- Index
Summary
AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE VERB AGREEMENT
Now that we understand how iconicity and conceptual metaphor function, and how they work together in signed languages, we are ready to tackle a core issue of ASL's grammar: verb agreement. We touched on this topic briefly in Chapter Five, while discussing space-for-space iconicity; it concerns how some ASL verbs move in space from an area representing one referent to an area representing another referent.
Most linguists talk about this phenomenon as if the two endpoints of the movement were all that mattered; they refer to it as “incorporation” of the referents' spatial locations into the verbs' movement patterns. I prefer to discuss it in terms of the verb's entire movement: In my analysis, the verb traces a path from one referent to the other that is specified by the verb's semantics.
In this discussion we will limit ourselves to frozen or lexicalized ASL verbs, and not examine classifier forms (which have their own iconic principles for incorporating movement). There are several different “systems” within ASL for determining how verbs move; all are highly iconic, and some are metaphorical as well. Some are based on the verb's semantics in a clear and obvious way, and others have taken on layers of conventionalized structure on top of the direct semantic motivation.
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- Information
- Language from the BodyIconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language, pp. 159 - 195Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001