Verb Agreement in ASL

Verb Agreement in ASL

Introduction

There exist two grammatical structures in ASL for pointing out the relationship between a verb and its noun arguments : the first - word , and the second - inflections on the verb that are referred to as verb agreement ' or directionality ' In the language of adults some verbs do not have verb agreement in other words , their forms are not altered depending on their corresponding noun arguments . With these verbs , subject - verb - object has control . For other verbs nevertheless , the form of the verb stem is changed so that

the verb agrees in its location , orientation or direction of movement with the spatial loci of the corresponding nouns . In this case , the arrangement of words in a phrase is quite flexible . This focuses on verb agreement , reviewing some of the properties of verb agreement and discussing what is behind the morphology

Verb Agreement in ASL

Verb agreement in ASL is associated with the verb 's entire movement . The verb follows a path from one referent to the other that is determined by the verb 's semantics (Meier 1982 . A large number of verbs in ASL are inflected to be agreeable with their noun arguments . This process of inflection takes the form of changing the verb 's space location orientation , and /or direction of movement to be agreeable with the space locus of the specific nouns (Meier 2002 ,

. 90 . There are verbs that agree with only one argument . If these verbs include movement as a...