Irit Meir

A CROSS-MODALITY PERSPECTIVE ON VERB AGREEMENT

Verb agreement in sign languages (illustrated here by Israeli Sign Language, ISL) seems to differ greatly from that of spoken languages, as it seems to be thematically oriented and is realized morphologically only on a subset of verbs in the language. These properties present both typological and theoretical challenges, since agreement is generally regarded as a structural relation, realized morphologically as inflectional affixes on the verbal element. These challenges are addressed here by applying aparticular componential analysis (along the lines of Jackendoff 1990) to the class of verbs which inflect for agreement in ISL. This analysis enables us to capture and explain the similarities as well as differences between the agreement systems of signed and spoken languages. It argues that agreement is basically a structural relation in languages in both modalities. The unique properties of sign language verb agreement are attributed to the difference in the agreeing element: verbs and auxiliaries in spoken languages vs. a spatial predicate in sign languages. These conclusions have some significant theoretical implications, both for capturingaspects of the interaction between modality and the structure of language, andfor imposing restrictions on the structure of the lexicon.

Body as subject

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sublexical structure of iconic signs denoting state of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form-meaning correspondence: the signers body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event - including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typological puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology.

A language in space : the story of Israeli sign language

Contents: Israeli Sign Language: Language and People. The Basic Components of the Word in Sign Language. Vocabulary. Grammar in Space: The Pronominal System. Grammar in Space: Verb Agreement. Tenses and Aspects. Shapes, Locations, and Motions in Space: Classifier Constructions. Word Order. Negative and Interrogative Sentences. Beyond the Hands: Facial Expression as Intonation in ISL. The History of the Deaf Community in Israel. The Emergence and Development of ISL. Voices From the Community. Similarities and Differences Across Sign Languages. The Contribution of Sign Languages to Linguistic Research. Appendix A: List of Handshapes of Israeli Sign Language. Appendix B: Main Places of Articulation in Israeli Sign Language. Appendix C: Notational Conventions.

Morphological universals and the sign language type

We have shown that established sign languages comprise a morphological type. In all these languages, visuo-spatial concepts and relations are represented in a motivated yet rule-governed and linguistic morphological system. Developed sign languages also show non-motivated, grammaticalized morphology, but to a limited extent, because they are young. ABSL shows neither the motivated nor the arbitrary morphology found in more developed sign languages. The lesson from ABSL is therefore that even the motivated morphology that we find in all established sign languages requires social interaction over time to crystallize. ABSL thus vindicates the new language prototype: little or no systematic morphology. This prototype was originally formulated on the basis of creole languages, but the formulation has run into empirical difficulty in recent years, as we noted above. Because ABSL is a completely new language, it allows us to distinguish between relatively young languages (established creoles and sign languages) and new languages, and to realize that the prototype holds of the latter.

Competing iconicities in the structure of languages

Abstract The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examine the interaction between iconicity and grammar by focusing on the ways in which sign languages employ the physical body of the signer as a rich iconic resource for encoding a variety of grammatical notions. We show that the body can play three different roles in iconic forms in sign languages: it can be used as a naming device where body parts represent body parts; it can represent the subject argument of verbal signs, and it can stand for first person. These strategies interact and sometimes compete in the languages under study. Each language resolves these competitions differently, which results in different grammars and grammatical structures. The investigation of the ways in which grammar and iconicity interact in these languages provides insight into the nature of both systems.

Grammaticalization and modality: the emergence of a case-marked pronoun in Israeli Sign Language"

This paper focuses on the role of modality in determining certain properties of grammaticalization processes in signed vs. spoken languages. The process examined here is the evolution of a case-marked pronoun in the pronominal system of Israeli Sign Language. This pronoun is shown to have evolved from the homophonous noun PERSON. The grammaticalization path leading to the evolution of a case distinction is compared to the evolution of case markers in spoken languages. This comparison reveals that languages in dierent modalities target dierent words as sources for grammaticalization. Case markers in spoken languages usually evolve from certain nouns or verbs denoting spatial relations, while in sign languages this is not the case. It is suggested that this dierence might be attributed to the scarcity of prepositions in sign languages, and to the iconicity of spatial predicates, which may restrict the possible grammaticalization processes in which they may participate. One of the more productive ways for a language to acquire new grammatical structures is by means of grammaticalization, a process which involves the evolution of grammatical morphemes from full lexical items.# The present paper focuses on a grammaticalization process in a language transmitted via

Verb classifiers as noun incorporation in Israeli sign language

This paper focuses on verb classifiers in Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Classifiers in sign languages are morphemes consisting of particular hand configurations, which classify a group of nouns on the basis of a salient characteristic feature. This feature could be their size and shape, some semantic similarity, or the way in which they are being handled. Verb classifiers attach to verbal roots denoting motion and location, to form a complex verb expressing spatial relations as well as a class of possible referents of which these spatial relations obtain. Classifiers have been the focus of numerous studies in a variety of sign languages.1 Investigations of the phonology and semantics of classifiers have revealed that (a) despite their iconic nature, classifier systems of sign languages are discrete, grammatical and rule governed, and as such are part of the linguistic structure of the language; and (b) the semantic categories expressed by sign language classifiers are basically the same categories found in spoken languages (see Supalla 1982, 1986, and Mcdonald 1983).

The role of prosody in morphological change: The case of Hebrew bound numerals

The morphological system of cardinal numerals in Modern Hebrew is currently undergoing rapid changes, enabling linguists to unravel the forces shaping the change as it takes place. In the free forms, gender marking on numerals is neutralized by collapsing both masculine and feminine forms into one paradigm, the feminine paradigm. In the bound (definite) forms, an opposite direction is attested, in that at least for some numerals, the masculine forms become more prevalent. The study reported here aims to determine whether the factor determining the change is prosodic or functional in nature, by eliciting production and grammaticality judgments of noun phrases containing bound numerals from five different age groups of native speakers. The results suggest that prosody plays a role in shaping the change, as forms with penultimate stress are favored over those with ultimate stress. In addition, processes of production and processes of grammaticality judgments seem to be subject to different kinds of constraints. This state of affairs indicates that the tension between the tendencies toward simplification on the one hand and maximal distinctness on the other occurs at the morphological level as well. The special history of Modern Hebrew (MH) makes it particularly interesting for the study of language change. Both sociolinguistic factors and language-internal factors contribute to the accelerated changes the language is undergoing. As a mother tongue in a community of speakers, MH is very young, only about a hundred years old. The language, which was revived by literate adults on the basis of older stages of the language, took a different course of development once it acquired native speakers. The constant tension between the natural development of MH and normative demands is still very strong and plays a role in shaping the structure of the language (Ravid, 1995a:6–8). One specific domain of instability in the language is morphophonology. The morphology of MH is largely that of Biblical Hebrew. Its phonology is strongly influenced by the phonologies of the native languages of the revivers. The incongruity between a Semitic morphology and a non-Semitic phonology I thank Renana Avda, Hila Polak-Yitzhaki, and Ruth Cohen for their assistance in collecting the data, and Wendy Sandier, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for helpful comments on the paper. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 21st meeting of the Israeli Linguistic Association, Haifa 2005. I thank the participants for their comments and questions. 41 Language Variation and Change, 20 (2008), 41–65. Printed in the U.S.A. # 2008 Cambridge University Press 0954-3945/08

The emergence of embedded structure: insights from Kafr Qasem Sign Language.

16.00 doi: 10.1017/S0954394508000070 rendered many morphophonological alternations opaque, resulting in rapid changes in the language (Ravid, 1995a:7). Both types of tension—that between normativism and natural language development, and that between the phonology and the morphology of the language—are very active in the language and its community of speakers, contributing to the constant flux in patterns of the language. This situation, often quite unsettling for the speakers, is very fortunate for linguists, as it facilitates studying these changes and the factors that bring them about while they are taking place. One of the most noticeable developments in the language is the change in the system of cardinal numerals. This change, denigrated by language teachers and planners, is very robust, characterizing the language of speakers from all socioeconomic backgrounds (Ravid, 1995b). Previous studies of the phenomenon (Bolozky, 1982; Ravid, 1995b) focused on the neutralization of gender marking in the free forms of the numerals. The present study is concerned with the less studied forms of the system, the bound forms, which mark definiteness distinctions. The study consists of eliciting production and grammaticality judgments of noun phrases (NPs) containing bound numerals from five different age groups of native speakers. The analysis of the results makes two novel theoretical claims: (a) The prosodic structures of forms, more specifically their stress patterns, play an important role in shaping the emergent system, (b) Morphological production and perception processes are shaped by different, somewhat conflicting constraints. This tension has often been argued to play a role in shaping phonological changes and grammaticalization processes. The present study shows that it figures in morphological changes as well. P R O P E R T I E S O F C A R D I N A L N U M E R A L S I N H E B R E W Cardinal numerals in Hebrew, like other noun modifiers such as adjectives and demonstratives, agree in both gender (masculine and feminine) and definiteness (definite and indefinite) with the nouns they modify. However, the morphological marking of these two grammatical categories on cardinal numerals differs in significant respects from other nominal modifiers. Gender marking in numerals is the opposite of what is found in all other systems in the language: the general pattern in the language is that masculine forms are basic, and feminine forms are derived by suffixation of a special feminine marker (-a or -t), as in (1).1 In numerals, in contrast, the feminine forms are basic, while the masculine forms are marked by suffixation of -a, as in (2). (1) nexmad (nice, masc.)—nexmad-a (nice, fem.); tipši (foolish, masc.)—tipši-t

The Impact of Contact Languages on the Degrammaticalization of the Hebrew Definite Article

This paper introduces data from Kafr Qasem Sign Language (KQSL), an as-yet undescribed sign language, and identifies the earliest indications of embedding in this young language. Using semantic and prosodic criteria, we identify predicates that form a constituent with a noun, functionally modifying it. We analyze these structures as instances of embedded predicates, exhibiting what can be regarded as very early stages in the development of subordinate constructions, and argue that these structures may bear directly on questions about the development of embedding and subordination in language in general. Deutscher (2009) argues persuasively that nominalization of a verb is the first step—and the crucial step—toward syntactic embedding. It has also been suggested that prosodic marking may precede syntactic marking of embedding (Mithun, 2009). However, the relevant data from the stage at which embedding first emerges have not previously been available. KQSL might be the missing piece of the puzzle: a language in which a noun can be modified by an additional predicate, forming a proposition within a proposition, sustained entirely by prosodic means.