Dawn MacLaughlin

The Licensing of Null Arguments in American Sign Language

The distribution of null arguments across languages has been accounted for in terms of two distinct strategies: licensing by agreement and licensing by topic. Lillo-Martin (1986, 1991) claims that American Sign Language (ASL) exploits both strategies for licensing null arguments, depending on the morphological characteristics of the verb. Here we show that this is incorrect. Once the nonmanual correlates of agreement features (comparable to the nonmanual expressions of other syntactic features) in ASL are recognized, it becomes apparent that null arguments in this language are systematically licensed by an expression of syntactic agreement.

Realizations of syntactic agreement in American sign language : Similarities between the clause and the noun phrase

ASL syntax makes essential use of specific non-manual expressions of syntactic features (e.g., +neg, +wh) that co-occur with manual signs. These markings occur obligatorily with manual material contained in the node of origin and optionally extend over the c-command domain of that node, thus providing important evidence for hierarchical structure. In this article, we show that agreement features, both within the clause and the noun phrase, also have non-manual correlates that exhibit the predicted distribution. Interestingly, transitive IPs and possessive DPs pattern together in their manifestation of agreement marking, while intransitive IPs pattern with non-possessive DPs.

Book reviews : White, L. 1989: Universal Grammar and second language acquisition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, xii + 198 pp. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 1)

Luján, M., Minaya, L., and Sankoff, D. 1984: The universal consistency hypothesis and the prediction of word order acquisition stages in the speech of bilingual children. Language 60: 343-71. Muysken, P. 1984: The Spanish that Quechua speakers learn. In Andersen, R., editor, Second languages: a crosslinguistic perspective. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Odlin, T. 1990: Word order transfer, metalinguistic awareness, and constraints on foreign language learning. In Van Patten, W. and Lee, J., editors, Second language acquisition/foreign language learning.. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Odlin, T. no date: Irish English idioms and language transfer. Unpublished manuscript. Ringbom, H. 1987: The role of the first language in foreign language learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rutherford, W. 1983: Language typology and language transfer. In Gass, S. and Selinker, L., editors, Language transfer in language learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Schachter, J. 1974: An error in error analysis. Language Learning 24: 205-14.