The typological classification of sign

Joke Schuit Master’s Thesis, 2007 Research MA Linguistics Universiteit van Amsterdam

AMSTERDAM Table of contents

Languages and glossing conventions used...... 2 1. Introduction ...... 4 2. Signed : an introduction to the research and phonology ...... 7 2.1 research: introduction ...... 7 2.1.1 The oral language compatibility view versus the sign language differential view8 2.2 Sign language phonology...... 10 3. Typology and processes ...... 15 3.1. ...... 16 3.1.1. Traditional classification...... 17 3.1.2. Morphological processes that are difficult to classify typologically...... 19 3.2. Morphological processes...... 22 3.2.1. Derivation in spoken languages ...... 22 3.2.2. Noun incorporation in spoken languages ...... 23 3.2.3. Inflectional processes in spoken languages...... 24 3.2.3.1. Pluralisation of nouns...... 24 3.2.3.2. Verb in spoken languages...... 25 3.2.3.3. Aspectual operations on verbs in spoken languages ...... 27 3.3. Summary ...... 29 4. Morphological processes in signed languages ...... 30 4.1 Sequential processes...... 31 4.1.1 Affixation ...... 31 4.2 Reduplication ...... 32 4.2.1 Aspect...... 32 4.2.2 Number...... 34 4.2.3 Derivation...... 35 4.3 Simultaneous processes...... 35 4.3.1 Manual simultaneous processes ...... 36 4.3.1.1 Incorporation ...... 36 4.3.1.2 Classifiers...... 38 4.3.1.3 Verb agreement ...... 40 4.3.1.4 Aspect...... 42 4.3.2 Simultaneous processes involving non-manual features...... 43 4.4 Summary ...... 45 5. Discussion ...... 46 5.1 Incorporating features in signed languages...... 46 5.2 Isolating features in signed languages...... 50 5.3 Agglutinative features in signed languages...... 51 5.3.1 Polysyllabic polymorphemic signs...... 52 5.3.2 Monosyllabic polymorphemic signs ...... 52 5.4 Fusional features in signed languages...... 59 5.5 Summary: the morphological classification of signed languages ...... 60 References ...... 63

1 Languages and glossing conventions used

Abbreviations of signed languages ASL BSL DGS (Deutsche Gebärdensprache) NGT Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal) LSF (Langue des Signes Françaises) LSQ Sign Language of Québec (Langue des Signes Québécoise) ISL

Classification and area of languages in this thesis; from Dryer (2005).

Apurinã [Maipure/Arawakan1: Brazil] Dutch [Indo-European> Germanic: Netherlands] English [Indo-European> Germanic: United Kingdom, United States] (Gulf) [Afro-Asiatic> Semitic: Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates] Imbabura Quechua [Quechuan: Equador, province of Imbabura] [Eskimo-Aleut: ] Lahu [Sino-Tibetan> Tibeto-Burman>Burmese-Lolo: China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Viet Nam] Luvale [Niger-Congo>Benue-Congo>Bantoid: Angola] Malay [Austronesian>Western Malayo Polynesian> Sundic: Malaysia] [Sino-Tibetan>Chinese: China] Oneida [Iroquoian>Northern: United States] Papiamentu [Creole: Netherlands Antilles and Aruba] Rapanui [Austronesian>Eastern Malayo-Polynesian>Oceanic: Easter Island] Rembarrnga [Australian>Gunwinyguan: Australia] Shilluk [Nilo-Saharan>Eastern Sudanic>Nilotic : Sudan] Tausug [Austronesian>Western Malayo Polynesian>Meso-Philippine: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia] Tuvaluan [Austronesian>Eastern Malayo-Polynesian>Oceanic: Tuvalu] West Greenlandic [Eskimo-Aleut: Greenland] Yakan [Austronesian>Western Malayo-Polynesian>Sama-Bajaw: Phillipines]

Glossing conventions In some examples, the glossing is slightly adapted so all follow the same system. No changes are made regarding content . The following abbreviations have been used:

AGENT agentative ASP aspect particle AUGM augmentative CML compound linker CNT contrastive – absolutive marker CRS crescent DAT dative DIM diminuative DUR durative

1 See for a detailed explanation of the use of Maipure or Arawakan section 1.2 of Da Silva Facundes (2000).

2 HAB habitual INC inceptive INDEF indefinite mode INDIC indicative mood INF infinitive JOIN stem-joiner M masculine NEG negative NMLZ nominalizer O object PAR particle PASS passive marker PASS passive PF perfect aspect marker PFTV perfective aspect marker PL plural PLZ pluralizer POSR possessor POSV possessive PP past punctual PRODUCT product ( indicating result or product of an action) PROGR progressive marker PST past PUF not indicated in Matisoff (2003) PUNC punctual aspect PV not indicated in Matisoff (2003) SER serial aspect VBLZ verbalizer

Sign language glossing conventions

Small capitals are used to refer to glosses of signs: SIGN.

Sequential compound signs are linked by ^: MONEY^LITTLE ‘cheap’

When a sign cannot be translated in one English , hyphens are used: WALK-DOWN-THE-

STAIRS.

A classifier is indicated by CL, followed by a picture of the appropriate , or a letter taken from the manual alphabet from NGT: GIVE- CLF.

Locations in space are indicated by subscript numbers. These letters refer to a in space; 1 refers to first person, 2 refers to second person/addressee, and 3 refers to any other referent in the discourse. If there are multiple other referents, letters are added to indicate the different third persons: 3GIVE2, 3aGIVE3b.

3 1. Introduction When one is describing a language, one of the typological aspects one may want to take into consideration is the determination of morphological language type. To what extent does the language under consideration allow affixation? Can several occur in a word? Answering these questions determines the synthetic ‘value’ of the language: where on the continuum of synthesis should it be placed, more to the isolating end, or more to the agglutinative end? If the language is placed more to the agglutinative end, one can determine the amount of fusion in the language. Again the language can be placed on a continuum: more fusing or more agglutinative. It will also be interesting to see whether the language allows for incorporation, and if so, to what extent. Some aspects of the morphology will be classified more easily, others will be more problematic. The researcher will probably find that the language types are not defined the same in the literature. For example, some authors might define polysynthesis as allowing for more morphemes in a word (e.g. Payne, 1997 and Whaley 1999), while others use the term to refer to languages that allow for a combination of lexical elements in a word (e.g. Appel, Baker, Hengeveld, Kuiken and Muysken, 2002 and Pirkola, 2001). In this thesis, there will not be one language under investigation, but a language group, namely signed2 languages. As it has been found that signed languages have similar structure in their inflectional morphology (Aronoff, Meir and Sandler, 2000), the aim of this thesis is to determine the language type of signed languages in general. Although the same authors have concluded that derivational morphology is sign language specific, it will be shown that, although differing from one signed language to another, derivational operations follow the same pattern cross-linguistically, and can be classed similarly. Not many authors have classified a signed language typologically. Bellugi and Klima (1982) suggested that American Sign Language (ASL) can be compared to polysynthetic spoken languages. This proposal is based on the morphological complexity of the language, as morphemes occur simultaneously in space. Erlenkamp (2000), on the other hand, proposed that the morphology of German Sign Language (DGS3) is partly isolating and partly fusing, while Schwager (2004) proposes an agglutinative analysis. In other words, these few studies all propose a different classification, and therefore an extensive analysis is needed.

2 We will use the term ‘signed language’ as the adjective aligns with ‘spoken’, so we can discuss languages that are either spoken or signed. We will use ‘sign language’ adjectivally, e.g. ‘sign language morphology’. 3 See the list of abbreviations for more explanation.

4 Since the morphemes in a sign frequently combine simultaneously, it might be tempting to classify the morphology as fusional. Morphology is fusional if the morphemes are fused together. However, although signed simultaneously, it is not that difficult to segment the morphemes in a sign. In this thesis, it will be made clear that signed languages should not be classified as fusional, and therefore should be placed near the agglutinative end of the continuum of the index of fusion. It is expected that the morphology of signed languages is mainly agglutinative, and slightly isolating. In the end, it will be clear to the reader that inflectional morphology of signed languages is agglutinative, and that the is simultaneous in nature. Also will it be clear that derivational morphology is agglutinative, and that this agglutination is more sequential. The isolating features that can be found in signed languages can be found throughout the morphology of signed languages. As for sign language typology, only a few studies exist. A comparison of interrogative and negative constructions in signed languages is described by Zeshan (2004a and b), and the same research group is now in the process of studying possession and existence, comparing 25 sign languages (website Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). The findings of the first studies show that there are is a high level of similarity in the non-manual marking of negation and interrogation, and that “the most common syntactic position for question words are clause initial, clause final, or both, that is, a construction with a doubling of the question word” (Zeshan, 2004b). Differences have also been found, mainly in the form of the manual marker of negation and in the paradigm of question words. These typological studies are cross-linguistic comparisons of a certain linguistic phenomenon. The aim of the present study is to determine the morphological type of signed languages. As has been said before, it is expected that signed languages are of the same morphological type. Because time and space do not allow for an extensive study of all signed languages that have been documented so far, it will be assumed that the examples given in the chapter on morphological processes in signed languages (chapter 4) are a representative sample for the aim of this thesis. In the next chapters, morphological typology and processes in spoken and signed languages will be described. Chapter 2 will lay out a background of signed languages. Sign language phonology will be introduced, as well as different approaches to sign language research. In chapter 3, morphological typology in spoken languages will be discussed, and the different morphological types will be explained in the first section. In the second section, we will take a look at the realisation of these morphological types in different morphological

5 processes. The same morphological processes in signed languages will then be discussed in chapter 4, and in chapter 5 these will be classified. Chapter 6 will be the concluding chapter, with suggestions for further research.

6 2. Signed languages: an introduction to the research and phonology Sign language research started in the middle of the twentieth century. Bernard Tervoort (1953) and (1960) were the pioneers as it comes to claiming linguistic status to sign language. Although these claims were affirmed in the years to follow, legal recognition of the sign language has only occurred in a few countries. Still, plenty research is being done, and the number of signed languages under analysis grows. After western signed languages as for example the American, British, and Swedish Sign Languages, also Asian and African signed languages are studied more and more intensively. Furthermore, over the last decade, more attention has been paid to signed languages in village communities, for instance the village of Kata Kolok on the island of Bali (Branson et al. 1996, 1999) and the village of Adamorobe in Ghana (Nyst, 2007). In this chapter, sign language research will be introduced. We will take a short look at the history of sign language research in section 2.1, and two different views on sign linguistic research will be explained in section 2.1.1. To introduce the simultaneous nature of signed languages, section 2.2 will describe sign language phonology.

2.1 Sign language research: introduction

Sign languages are young languages. The first records of sign language stem from the sixteenth century, and they merely contain the manual alphabet (Lane, 1984). This is a series of hand configurations denoting the letters of an alphabet.4 The first more extensive description of a sign language is given by Abbé de l’Épée, an abbot in Paris, France who set up the first school for the deaf (inter alia Lane, 1984). From the 1960s linguistic research of signed languages established that the gestures previously thought to be mime or primitive, limited language at best, formed a natural language (Stokoe, 1960). It was also established that the signs used in different Deaf communities were different and mutually unintelligible: different sign languages were acknowledged. It became clear that signed languages make use of the manual-visual modality, while spoken languages make use of the auditive-oral modality. A few years later, the first publications appeared mentioning the Deaf community (i.e. Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Padden and Humphries, 1988). Deaf communities have their own culture, with their own values and their own language. This makes them a minority group, both culturally and linguistically. As Deaf children are often born to hearing parents –only 5

4 Most descriptions of manual alphabets focus on the Roman alphabet, but for example the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets also have manual alphabets, used in the Deaf communities in the countries that use these alphabets.

7 to 10% of the Deaf children is born to one or two Deaf parents– and as Deaf parents often have hearing children, the community is dispersed. However, we can still speak of a Deaf community, as people often gather, in Deaf clubs or in Deaf sports clubs. Not much is known yet about the genetic relationships between signed languages. Zeshan (2005) describes the difficulties one would encounter when applying the “familiar historical- comparative method to sign languages” (p. 558). Genealogical relationships, i.e. language families are difficult to define and describe. However, Zeshan (2005) also suggest that it is “possible to link sign languages to each other because […] most sign languages in their present form are young languages with a documented history” (p. 558). Since the onset of sign language research there have been debates about what the ways of study should be. In the next section, part of this discussion will be outlined.

2.1.1 The oral language compatibility view versus the sign language differential view

The similarity among signed languages has always struck sign linguists as peculiar, as oral languages seem to have more variation. Meier (2002) discusses this phenomenon. He gives five possible linguistic outcomes that might arise when one studies modality effects. The first outcome is that there are not much interesting structural differences. The second is linked to statistical tendencies: some linguistic features arise more in one modality than the other. The third outcome is that “signed languages generally opt for nonconcatenative morphology” while “[s]poken languages generally opt for concatenative morphology” (Meier, 2002:16). The fourth possibility is that there are grammatical rules or typological patters that are unique to signed languages and those that are unique to spoken languages. Meier (2002) gives three possible candidates that might be the uniqueness of signed languages, all of them linked to the use of space. The last possibility is that signed languages overall are more uniform and spoken languages more diverse (Meier, 2002). All of the possible outcomes Meier (2002) gives us can be narrowed down to one basic reason: signed languages are more uniform because of the possibilities the visual-manual modality offers them. They do, however, differ with respect to syntax (for instance the use of auxiliaries and ), in their phonological structures (different inventories of , or different constraints on the use of parameters) and of course in their vocabularies (Meier, 2002). This viewpoint Meier (2002) argues for, is not entirely new. In an early publication on sign language research, the differences between sign languages and spoken languages were discussed. Questions were raised whether they should be compared or not. Karlsson (1984)

8 described two different views on sign language research:

On the one hand, there is the oral language compatibility view. This presupposes that most of SL structure is in principle compatible with ordinary linguistic concepts. On the other hand, there is the SL differential view. This is based on the hypothesis that SL is so unique in structure that its description should not be primarily modelled on oral language analogies. (Karlsson, 1984, p. 149- 150)

There seemed to be a preference for the sign language differential view in those days. Not only several European scholars (authored in Loncke, Boyes-Braem and Lebrun, 1984), but also several American researchers (authored in Schlesinger and Namir, 1978) show a preference for this view. However, quite soon the sign language differential view was almost entirely abandoned. To emphasize the linguistic status of sign languages, the oral language compatibility view took over. According to Vermeerbergen (2006), there were other reasons, too, of which the first is that many sign linguists in the early days were not all fluent signers. They used their linguistic knowledge gained from studying spoken languages in sign linguistic research. Above all, most of the languages studied were languages with a strong written tradition, although sign languages have more in common with languages that have an oral tradition5. Vermeerbergen (2006) gives an overview with three other reasons explaining why sign language and sign linguistic research quickly shifted to the oral language compatibility view. Briefly they are (1) the wish of some researchers to put sign language research in an already existing theoretical framework; (2) the notation system used which can influence the data; and (3) data collection via translations of written sentences into signed sentences. Vermeerbergen (2006) also gives an overview of the possible shift back to the sign language differential view, as some studies now focus on the unique characteristics of sign languages. An example of this shift is the approach to constituent order in sign languages as Dubuisson, Miller and Pinsonneault (1994) have argued. They state that the preferred constituent order has little to do with syntactic ordering. They argue that the placement of question words in Québec Sign Language (LSQ) is quite free on the basis of articulatory reasons: the preferred order is the result of the or flow of a signed sentence. Either an overall movement away from the body or a consistent movement in one direction create the order of the signed sentence in LSQ. This view certainly sheds a new light, and although

5 See Frishberg (1988), Peters (2000) Sutton-Spence (2000, 2005) for a comparison of sign language poetry to oral literature, a term from Ong (1982).

9 this is not the place to investigate this further, a native signer of British Sign Language suggested something similar (Clive Mason, p.c.). The ‘economy of movement’ (Dubuisson et al., 1994) might thus be a new explanation for the free constituent order found in sign languages. An exception to the parting from the sign language differential view forms the ‘French tradition’ (Vermeerbergen, 2006:170). Cuxac, its main representative, has looked at French Sign Language (LSF) from a sign language differential viewpoint from the beginning of his research. He focuses on iconicity and sees this as the basis of sign languages: his ‘grammaire de l’iconicité’ is designed on the basis of the creation of signs and sign languages (1996, 2000). He even suggests that linguistics as a scientific discipline should be revised because of the characteristics of LSF and other sign languages (Cuxac, 2003). His proposition is that the entire discipline is changed in such a way that the instruments and terms can be applied to sign languages as well as spoken languages. Although it is not the aim of this thesis to revise and redesign a new framework for the traditional morphological types, let alone the entire linguistic discipline, it will answer the question whether the traditional types are applicable to sign languages (in line with the oral language compatibility view) or whether we are in need of a new, additional language type (partly in line with the sign language differential view). With this outline, we will now turn to sign language phonology.

2.2 Sign language phonology

Stokoe (1960) was the first to describe the phonology of ASL. He distinguished between three parameters in a sign, which he called designator (the handshape), tabulator (the location), and signation (the movement). He referred to them as cherems, from the Greek word ‘cheros’ meaning ‘hand’. In line with spoken language research, the use of phonology and became common in the 1970s to emphasize the linguistic status of signed languages. The phonemes have also been referred to as parameters, and we will use both terms interchangeably throughout this thesis. Researchers are in consensus so far that handshape, location and movement are central phonemes in phonology. A fourth , orientation, referring to the orientation of the palm and the fingers in space, identified by Battison (1978), is still a slightly debated issue6. The non-dominant hand is a non-disputed issue nowadays. It appears to be a “subordinate

6 See Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006:266-268) for an overview of the different models.

10 category and not a ‘separate but equal’ articulator in the lexical representation of signs” (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006:267, emphasis in original). A fifth parameter is the non-manual part of a sign, but there is some debate whether this is phonetic or not. In some cases however, the non-manual features change the meaning of a sign. An example of this can be found in the NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands) minimal pair BROTHER and SISTER. The manual part of these signs is exactly the same, and they are distinguished by the of the Dutch words ‘broer’ (brother) and ‘zus’ (sister). Of course, minimal pairs can be found for the manual part of signs also. In the following examples from VGT (), we can find minimal pairs differing in handshape (1), location (2), movement (3), and orientation (4).

(1) Handshape

GOOD-LUCK LETTER

(2) Location

DRUNK JEALOUS

(3) Movement

WHAT AIRPLANE

11 (4) Orientation

ANTWERP BELL

From the onset of sign language research, scholars were aware of the simultaneous phonological structure of signs. Liddell and Johnson (1986; 1989 [1985]) expand Liddell’s (1984) analysis of sequences in phonological segments. They treat movements and holds as the sequential phonological parts of signs, and state the following:

“A MOVEMENT is defined as a period of time during which some aspect of the articulation is in transition. […] Although the term transitional is often used to a nonsignificant change […] [t]he changes which take place during a movement are phonologically significant. […] [A] hold is defined as a period of time during which all aspects of the articulation are in a steady state.” (Liddell and Johnson, 1986:447-448, emphasis in original).

They developed a schematic representation for the movements and holds which strongly resembles the representation of phonemes in spoken language in what is called ‘CV phonology’ (see Liddell and Johnson, 1986 for references to this description). Sandler (1986, 1989) developed the Hand Tier model, and suggested the formal representation in Figure 1 for the representation of a monomorphemic sign.

L = Location M = Movement HC = Hand Configuration7

Figure 1: Canonical form of a monomorphemic sign in the Hand Tier model.

7 For the complex structure of the Hand Configuration, see Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006, chapter 10 and references cited there.

12 The hand configuration has a complex structure, and a hierarchy has been developed as depicted in Figure 2, from Sandler (1986, 1989).

Hand configuration

Selected fingers

Finger position

Figure 2: Hierarchy of selected finger and finger position features.

Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) concluded that the phonologies of spoken and signed languages show several universals. The first is “the existence of a sublexical level of structure that is meaningless, discrete, finite, and systematically organized” (p. 272). It also holds for all languages that some features are unmarked, and that these features “cluster into categories that correspond to their articulators, and that these categories are organized hierachically” (p. 273). A last universal is that all languages have a prosodic structure, in signed languages found in non-manuals. Of course there are also differences between the phonological organisations of signed and spoken languages. These can mainly be contributed to the “physical production and perception systems” (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006:278) of the different modalities. In other studies, it has been suggested that the movement and location of a sign form a syllabic unit, comparable to the consonant-vowel combinations in spoken languages (inter alia Perlmutter, 1992; Sandler, 1996). This will become important in our analysis of polymorphemic signs that are monosyllabic. Two main syllable types found in signed languages are represented in Figure 3.

σ σ

L

Figure 3: The two types of syllables in signed languages.

13

This means that a syllable either consists of a location, a movement and another location, or it consists of a location only. The first syllable (LML) is probably more salient than the second (L), as it occurs much more often in the lexicon of signed languages, and most inflectional and derivational processes tend to change the base sign to an LML syllable instead of the L syllable (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006). Now sign language research and phonology have briefly been introduced, we will go back to the basics of morphological typology and processes in the next chapter. The four morphological types will be described with examples from spoken languages around the world, and several morphological processes will be described and exemplified.

14 3. Typology and processes

In this chapter, a background of morphological typology will be given. Since traditionally linguistics only considered spoken languages, an overview of some terms and their uses will be useful before we apply these notions to sign languages. There are many more nominal and verbal operations that have been found in typological descriptions of the world’s languages. As this thesis does not allow for an overview of all of them, a selection has been made. This chapter will first focus on morphological typology, and the different language types will be explained: isolating, agglutinative, fusing and polysynthetic. Then these types will be searched for in different morphological processes. But before we will consider these, let us start with the question “what is typology?” Whaley’s (1997) definition of is “[t]he classification of languages or components of language based on shared formal characteristics.” (p. 7) He states that this definition leads to the following propositions: 1. “Typology involves cross-linguistic comparison” (p. 7); 2. “A typological approach involves classification of either (a) components of languages or (b) languages” (p. 8); 3. “Typology is concerned with classification based on formal features of language.” (p. 11)

When comparing languages, linguistic patterns may occur. These patterns can be described in language universals. Language universals can be divided into three different kinds, absolute, non-absolute and implicational. Absolute universals are thought of to hold for all languages at all times. It seems quite difficult to find these, as one only needs to encounter one language that does not have the property described in the language universal. However, as Whaley (1999) puts it, “most absolute universals […] are sufficiently well established that it is a rare occurrence when they are shown to be false. Consider for example, the first absolute universal Whaley (1999) mentions: a. “All languages have consonants and vowels.” (Whaley, 1997:32)

Coincidentally, with the subject of this thesis in our minds, we question whether this still holds as an absolute universal, as signed languages do not have consonants nor vowels. The second type of universal is non-absolute. These allow exceptions, and one might think of them as tendencies more than as universals. An example, again from Whaley (1997): b. “Most languages have adjectives.” (p. 32)

15 Furthermore, universals can be implicational, i.e. have preconditions. They are of the form “if X then Y”, and examples are some of Greenberg’s Universals. Implicational universals can be either absolute or non-absolute. c. Greenberg’s Universal 18: If a language places the demonstrative after the noun, then it will place the adjective after the noun as well. d. Greenberg’s Universal 29: If a language has , it always has derivation.

At this point, it should already be clear that signed languages might challenge language universals. In principle, when the universals considering spoken language phonology are not taken into account, linguistic universals can also apply to signed languages. So far, only few cross-linguistic studies included a signed language, although this would be a better representation of the languages of the world, and therefore a very interesting study. The remaining part of this chapter is divided into two main sections: morphological typology (3.1) and morphological processes (3.2). The next section will deal with the traditional classification, and the morphological types will be illustrated with ample examples from various languages. Section 3.1.2 will then discuss some morphological processes that are difficult to classify. In the section thereafter, morphological processes will be described. The different morphological classifications as described in section 3.1 will be looked for in the processes under focus. The morphological processes selected give the reader an introduction and a background for chapter 4, where we will consider the same processes for signed languages. We will start with derivation (3.2.1), followed by an illustration of noun incorporation in spoken languages (3.2.2). The final section is dedicated to , focusing mainly on the pluralisation of nouns (3.2.3.1), verb agreement (3.2.3.2) and verbal aspect (3.2.3.3).

3.1. Morphological typology

In this section, we will look at the morphological language types. A language’s morphological structure has traditionally been the basis for language classification. There is a general agreement among linguists that there are three or four major language types (Pirkola, 2001; Lyovin, 1997; Shibatani and Bynon, 1995). In section 3.1.1 we will describe these types, and one has to keep in mind that for each of the types ideal examples will be given, and it will be shown in section 3.1.2 that not all morphological processes are easy to classify.

16 3.1.1. Traditional classification

The traditional morphological classification falls in four types: isolating, agglutinative, fusing and polysynthetic. Each of these types will be explained and examples from various languages will be given. “A strictly isolating language is one in which every word consists of only one morpheme” (Payne, 1997:27). This type has also been called analytic. Examples often cited are Chinese languages, for example Mandarin Chinese (1) and Lahu (2), but Papiamento (3), a spoken on the Netherlands Antilles, is a highly isolating language, too.

(1) Wǒ zài mǎi shū le. (Mandarin Chinese) I DUR buy book CRS “I am buying a book.” (Li and Thompson, 1981:21) (2) Lì chi mí-ch kə tā ve yò. (Lahu) book this shoulderbag insert PV PV PUF “These books have already been put into the shoulderbag.” (Matisoff, 2003:217) (3) Awor aki no tin mucho kos pa hasi. (Papiamentu) Now here not have many things for do “There isn’t much to do now.” (Kouwenberg and Murray, 1994:42)

The type is agglutinative. Typical agglutinative languages have long words, consisting of several morphemes. These morphemes are easily identified and segmented. Examples are Imbabura Quechua (4), and Turkish (5).

(4) Wasita rurarkani ñuka churipaj. (Imbabura Quechua) wasi- ta rura- rka- ni ñuka churi- paj house- ACC make- PST- 1 my son- BEN “I made a house for my son.” (Cole, 1982:113) (5) Evlerimizden gelmiyordum. (Turkish) ev- ler- im- iz- den gel- mi- yor- d- um house- PL- 1.POSV-POSR.PLZ- from come- NEG- PROGR-PST- 1 “I was not coming from our houses.” (Lyovin, 1997:17)

The third morphological type is fusional, sometimes also referred to as synthetic or inflecting. According to Lyovin (1997), fusional languages have a high degree of portmanteau morphs and morphemes. These are morphemes that carry more than one meaning. Lyovin (1997) exemplifies with the French au being a portmanteau morph “which is the realisation of a sequence of two morphemes: the preposition meaning ‘to’ and the masculine definite article,

17 both of which have independent realizations in other environments.” (p. 15). Portmanteau morphemes can be found extensively in Latin. The suffix –i in fili-i ‘of the son’, signals masculine gender, singular number and genitive case. Clearly, these three features are not realised by independent morphemes. If one of these components of meaning were to change, the suffix would change also. If, for example, only the gender would change, the form would be fili-ae ‘of the daughter’. If only the number would change, the suffix would be fili-orum ‘of the sons’. If both gender and case would change, e.g. to accusative case, the form would be fili-am ‘the daughteracc’. Latin is an example in which the fusion happens in an affix. However, fusion can also be found without affixation, in strong verbs for example. Some examples of fusion in past tense are: win – won, hold – held, choose – chose. If a language would be completely fusional, a large body of lexical items would exist to express grammatical relations, as all its morphology would be suppletive. For each noun, a separate plural item would have to exist, as plurality would be fusional also, making regularity a rare thing in the language. A language with those features would be extremely difficult to learn, which is probably the reason that no language known today is completely fusional (Comrie, 1989). We will see some examples of suppletive morphology below in section 3.2, where we take suppletion to be an extreme form of fusion. The last morphological type that has to be discussed here is polysynthetic or incorporating. A is an extreme form of agglutination, which allows not only for the affixation of grammatical elements, but also for several lexical elements to be incorporated into a word (Appel et al., 2002; Pirkola, 2001). Noun Incorporation is a distinctive feature of polysynthetic languages. Examples of polysynthetic languages are Inuktitut (6), West Greenlandic (7) and Oneida (8).

(6) Nasaliurtaunngitunga. (Inuktitut) nasaq- liuq- jau- nngit- junga hat- make- PASS- NEG- PAR.1SS “I am not being made a hat for.” (Crago and Allen, 1999:268) (7) Sunniutiqalirsinnaajunnaarpuq. (West Greenlandic) sunniuti- qa- lir- sinnaa- junnaar- puq influence- have- begin- can- no.longer- 3S.INDIC “It can no longer begin to have an influence.” (Fortescue, 1984:286) (8) Íhsle akuka:látuhse. (Oneida) hs- (e)l- hE a- ku- kal- A- tu- s- E 2S- want- SER INDEF- 1/2- story- JOIN- say- DAT- PUNC “You want me to tell you a story.” (Michelson, 1981:11&36)

18 Lyovin (1997) states that the difference between isolating and agglutinative languages is the same as the difference between fusional and polysynthetic languages. Isolating and fusional languages have relatively less affixation, and what can be expressed by independent words in these languages is expressed by bound in agglutinative and polysynthetic languages. Comrie (1989) describes two indexes on which languages can be placed morphologically. Both indexes should be regarded as continua: on both sides of each index one would find ideal language examples, and in between the two ends less ideal languages that tend either more toward the one side or the other. The first is the index of synthesis. It refers to the amount of morphemes that can occur in a word (Comrie, 1989). On the one side of the continuum one would find a language in which each word is monomorphemic, i.e. the ideal isolating language. On the other end one would find the ideal polysynthetic language, “in which complete utterances are formed by affixing morphemes to a root” (Whaley, 1997:128). The continuum then gives us the possibility to speak of ‘mainly isolating’ or ‘somewhat polysynthetic’ languages. The second is the index of fusion, which distinguishes between agglutinative and fusional languages (Comrie, 1989). This index refers to “the degree to which units of meaning are ‘fused’ into single morphological shapes” (Payne, 1997:28, emphasis in original).

3.1.2. Morphological processes that are difficult to classify typologically

As said before, it is difficult to find a language that perfectly matches the ‘ideal morphological type’. Researchers may come across a morphological phenomenon in a language that perfectly fits a morphological type, while another phenomenon perfectly fits another type. Also, agglutinative languages are by definition highly synthetic, and it appears that it only depends on the possibility to incorporate lexical items to change the morphological type to polysynthetic. What amount of lexical incorporation is needed has not been stated in the literature. In contrast to the morpheme-per-morpheme agglutination described above, Semitic languages exhibit another ‘type’ of agglutination. Noun and verb stems are always bimorphemic units. “The greater part of the vocabulary is formed by combining a consonantal root with a morpho-phonemic pattern. The root indicates a certain semantic field, and the patterns, the concrete form” (Junger, 1987:12). This has been commonly referred to as templatic morphology. An example from Arabic is found in (9).

19 (9) Verbal forms from the consonantal root k.t.b. ‘to write’ (Arabic) (a) katab ‘write’ (b) kattab ‘cause to write’ (c) kaatab ‘correspond’ (d) takaatab ‘write to each other’ (e) nkatab ‘subscribe’ (all examples: Spencer, 1991:10).

Not only verbal forms can be formed from the same consonantal root, also nouns or adjectives can be formed from the same consonantal root:

(10) Nominal forms from the root k.t.b. (Gulf Arabic) (a) kaatib/kaatba ‘clerk m/f’ (Qafisheh, 1977:87) (b) maktába ‘library, bookstore’ (idem, p. 89) (c) ktaab ‘a book’ (idem, adapted from p. 146)

We can see from these examples that two morphemes are added together to form one word. However, they are ‘interlinked’ to form a word. Schematically, it is represented as in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Schematic representation of katab ‘write’.

Another construction that is difficult to classify, is reduplication. Reduplication can be used in the realisation of several morphological processes. As the term says, material is reduplicated. The form of the affix thus depends on the form of the root. It can be either full reduplication, as seen in (11)(a) and (12)(a), or partial reduplication as seen in (11)(b) (reduplication of the final syllable) and in (12)(b) (reduplication of the initial syllable). In some constructions, not only the reduplicated material is added to the base, but also other material, often phonological. An example can be found in (13)(a) and (b), where a segment –ew– is added with a reduplication of the first consonant of the root.

(11) Malay (a) rumahsakit ‘hospital’ > rumahsakit-rumahsakit ‘hospitals’ (b) rumah ‘house’ > mah-rumah ‘houses’ (Hasan, 1974:45-46)

20 (12) Ilocano (a) bánga ‘pot’ > bangabánga ‘skull’ (b) kaldíng ‘goat’ > kalkaldíng ‘goats’ (Rubino, 2005:12) (13) Yakan (a) labo’ ‘fall’ > lewlabo’ ‘keep on falling’ (b) saget ‘mix’ > sewsaget ‘all mixed (several items)’ (Behrens 2002 in Rubino, 2005)

Reduplication can have many forms. It can also have many functions. We will encounter some of them in the next sections, when we are looking at different morphological processes. Another morphological process that is difficult to classify is compounding. “A compound is a word that is formed from two or more different words” (Payne, 1997:92). It is a process that can be found in many languages. Examples from English are ‘football,’ ‘headdress’ and ‘churchyard’. Other examples are given from Tuvaluan in (14), where we can see that the English translations are also compounds, whereas the Rapanui examples in (15) have no compound translation in English.

(14) Compounds in Tuvaluan (a) fulu mata ‘eyebrow’ hair eye-area (b) mea puke leo ‘tape recorder’ thing grab voice (Besnier, 2000:601-2) (15) Compounds in Rapanui (a) patia ika ‘harpoon’ spear fish (b) manu patia ‘wasp’ bird spear (Du Feu, 1996:180)

As compounds exist of two, or sometimes three lexical items, it might seem to be polysynthetic. But as the term entails the co-ordination of two lexical items, it is difficult to classify whether it is really polysynthetic, or whether it is a morphological process that exist outside of morphological typology. Summarizing the ideal morphological language types, isolation entails one word equalling one morpheme. Agglutination entails polymorphemic words, where one morpheme expresses one meaning and where they can easily be segmented. Fusional languages show a fusion of morphemes in a word, where the morphemes cannot be segmented. Polysynthetic languages are languages in which a word contains more than one lexical root. This type of language is intrinsically also agglutinative. One has to keep in mind that no language is ‘the ideal morphological type’. The classic examples for isolating languages also exhibit a certain

21 degree of agglutination, and the classic examples of agglutinative languages show some degree of fusion.

3.2. Morphological processes

In this section, we will take a look at several morphological processes, and for each of them, we will try to find isolating, agglutinative, fusional and reduplicative examples. The following morphological processes will be described: derivation, incorporation, noun pluralisation, verb agreement and aspect. In the next chapter, the same processes will be described for signed languages. They are chosen as they are relevant for the determination of the morphological type of signed languages.

3.2.1. Derivation in spoken languages

Derivation can be found in many languages across the world. “Derivational operations are defined as operations which derive an inflectable stem from a root or an intermediate stem.” (Payne, 1997:25). These operations often change the grammatical category of the root, but derivational operations can also change the valence of a verb root, while not changing the category of verb. Furthermore is it possible for derivational operations to change the basic concept that the root expresses (Payne, 1997). We will show examples of derivation expressed by agglutination, by fusion and by reduplication. Examples of derivational operations that are expressed by agglutination can be found in many languages. We can find an agentive marker in many languages: both Dutch and English use the –er affix to create agents from verbs, while Imbabura Quechua uses –j for the same process as exemplified in (16)(a). This language has a rich system to derive nouns from nouns or verbs, using affixes. For example, the affix –yuj derives a possessor, –sapa indicates the augmentative, while –gu is the diminutive suffix. Example (16)(b) demonstrates another derivational process: a noun being the product of the verb (Cole, 1982). In (17), some derivational examples from Tuvaluan are given, and in (18), we find some examples from Dutch.

(16) Nominalisation affixes in Imbabura Quechua (a) michi- j herd- AGENT ‘herder, one who herds’ (b) awa- shka weave- PRODUCT ‘a woven product’ (Cole, 1982:175&177)

22 (17) Examples of derivation from Tuvaluan (a) fakafui ‘tie in bunches of ten’ from fui ‘bunch of ten tied coconuts’ (b) logoaa ‘noisy’ from logo ‘hear’ (Besnier, 2000:603) (18) Examples of derivation from Dutch (a) verkleining ‘reducation’ from klein ‘small’ (b) gebergte ‘mountain range’ from berg ‘mountain’

Derivation can also be fusional, mainly due to a change in the vowel, as seen in examples (19)-(20). As these examples have not been studied in detail, we will not discuss which word is the base and which the derived form.

(19) Fusional derivation in English: (a) to sing versus song (b) to sit versus seat (20) Fusional derivation in Dutch: (a) zingen8 ‘to sing’ versus zanger ‘singer’ (b) smeden8 ‘to forge’ versus smid ‘smith’

Reduplication can also be used in derivation. Examples of noun to noun derivations from Tausug are dayangdayang ‘princess’ from dayang ‘madam’, and laway-laway ‘land snail’ from laway ‘saliva’ (Hassan et al. 1994 in Rubino, 2005).

3.2.2. Noun incorporation in spoken languages

When we speak of incorporation, it most often refers to noun incorporation (NI). This can be defined as “a morphological construction where a nominal lexical element is added to a verbal lexical element; the resulting construction being a verb and a single word” (De Reuse, 1994:252). Incorporation is a characterizing feature of polysynthetic languages. All languages that show NI are polysynthetic. Consider the following examples from Rembarrnga (21) and Oneida (22), where a word contains a verb and a noun. The incorporated noun is printed in bold.

(21) Ngadawalmuttungara. (Rembarrnga) Nga- dawal- muttu- ngara 1>3- country- show- FUT “I’ll show him the country...” (Saulwick, 2006:9)

8 NB: The stem of zingen is zing- while the stem of zanger is zang-. Compare to verkopen ‘to sell’ vs. verkoper ‘salesman’, where there is no vowel change. The stem of the verb smeden is smeed-, the vowel being /e:/, while in smid it is //.

23 (22) Onyotaa:ká: (Oneida) yo- ny- ot- E haka- NMLZ- stone- stand- PF- be.a.people- PF “People of the standing stone.” (Michelson, 1981:11&36)

A second characteristic of NI is that its distribution is limited. A sort of hierarchy can be found: “V[erb]-internally, [Incorporated Nouns] bear a limited number of possible semantic relationships to their host V’s […]. If a language incorporates N’s of only one semantic case, they will be patients of transitive V’s […]. If a language incorporates only two types of arguments, they will be patients of transitive and intransitive V’s.” (Mithun, 1984:875)

Another characteristic of NI is that the “incorporated noun often refers to a generic or unspecific class” (Baker, 1988:78). Furthermore, NI is not obligatory: it is possible to express the meaning with incorporated noun, but also analytically, meaning without NI (Baker, 1988). Sometimes classifier constructions in signed languages are said to be an instance of incorporation. It is for this reason that we dealt with incorporation here.

3.2.3. Inflectional processes in spoken languages

In this section, we will look at inflectional processes in spoken languages. Both verbs and nouns can inflect for several operations, but the focus will be on Agreement and Aspect for verbs, and Number for nouns, as these will be very useful for the determination of which morphological type sign languages belong to.

3.2.3.1. Pluralisation of nouns

“Spoken languages employ various strategies to mark the plural of nouns” (Pfau and Steinbach, 2006:135). We will see examples of pluralisation via agglutination, via reduplication, and via fusion.9 As the aim of this section is to illustrate the different possibilities of the morphological realisation of pluralisation, we will not pay attention to the phonological or lexical determination for pluralisation. Affixation is found in many Western European languages. Some languages have several allomorphs, as illustrated in (23) and (24). Note that these lists are not exhaustive.

9 We will not be concerned with the fact that many languages use more than one strategy for number marking.

24 (23) Plural allomorphs in Dutch (a) boek > boek-en ‘book > books’ (b) tafel > tafel-s ‘table > tables’ (c) kind > kind-eren ‘child > children’ (24) Plural allomorphs in German (a) Haus > Häus-er ‘house > houses’ (b) Maus > Mäus-e ‘mouse > mice’ (c) Bank > Bank-en ‘bank > banks’ (Pfau and Steinbach, 2006:140)

Pluralisation can also be expressed by reduplication. This is found, for instance, in many Polynesian languages. We have already seen some examples in (11) and (12) above, the former repeated here in (25).

(25) Pluralisation by reduplication in Malay (a) rumahsakit ‘hospital’ > rumahsakit-rumahsakit ‘hospitals’ (b) rumah ‘house’ > mah-rumah ‘houses’ (Hasan, 1974:45-46)

Some languages have suppletive forms for the plural of nouns. For instance, the French word oeil ‘eye’ has a plural form yeux ‘eyes’. Not only suppletive forms are examples of instances of pluralisation being expressed fusionally, also stem modification is an example of fusion, and it occurs much more often than suppletion. A stem internal modification changes the quality of the stem’s vowel. This can again be found in English (26), but also in German (27).

(26) goose > geese (English) (27) Vater > Väter ‘father > fathers’ (German)

3.2.3.2. Verb agreement in spoken languages

Agreement is “a process whereby grammatical element X matches a grammatical element Y in property Z within some grammatical configuration” (Barlow and Ferguson, 1988:1). Verb agreement typically operates according to a hierarchy. Consider the agreement hierarchy in Figure 5:

Subject > Direct object > Indirect Object > Other

Figure 5: The agreement hierarchy (Whaley, 1997:154)

25 This hierarchy predicts that if a language employs verb agreement to signal a relation between the verb and a nominal, it will express the grammatical relation of Subject. If verbs agree with two nominals, it will be the Subject and the Direct Object (Whaley, 1997). This hierarchy is also implicational: if a language employs agreement with the Indirect Object, it will also employ agreement with the DO and the S. Agreement with other nominal types than the S and O are often special. We will see in section 4.3.1.3 on verb agreement in signed languages, that this hierarchy is not directly applicable to signed languages, as verbs in signed languages most often agree with their O. In the following examples, we will see that agreement can be expressed via agglutination, and via fusion. In languages that express agreement, subject agreement is mainly obligatory, while object agreement is optional. An example of a language that expresses agreement via agglutination is Imbabura Quechua in (28). In (a) there is no object agreement, while in (b) and (c) there is object agreement. In all examples, subject agreement occurs.

(28) Agreement in Imbabura Quechua (a) Maryaka ñukata rikurka Marya- ka ñuka- ta riku- rka María- TOP I- ACC see- PST.3 “María saw me.” (b) Maryaka rikuwarka. Marya- ka riku- wa- rka María- TOP see- 1- PST.3 “María saw me.” (c) Rikuwarkangui. riku- wa- rka- ngui see- 1 PST 2 “You saw me.” (Cole, 1982:104-105)

In some languages, as for example in Remmbarnga, one agreement morpheme indicates both the subject and the object of the verb. This is an example of agglutinative morphology in which the affix is a fused morpheme. Saulwick (2006) refers to them as ‘bivalent bound pronominal argument prefixes’ and gives a table of ‘minimal’ (at least one) and ‘augmented’ (more than two) prefixes. Part of the table is repeated in Table 1.

26

Subject Object 1 minimal 2 minimal 3 minimal 1 minimal – dan- ngan- 2 minimal nginy- – nginy-, nan- 3 mimimal nga- da- ga-, ø, barr- Table 1: Some bivalent pronominal argument prefixes of Remmbarnga (Saulwick, 2006).

In many languages, the agreement paradigm of the verb ‘to be’ is suppletive, and we will take suppletion as an extreme form of fusion. In Table 2 below we find the paradigms of the present tense of the verb ‘to be’ in English, Dutch and French.

English Dutch French INF to be zijn être 1SG am ben suis 2SG are bent es/est10 3SG is is 1PL sommes 2PL are zijn êtes 3PL sont Table 2: Suppletive forms of the verb 'to be'.

3.2.3.3. Aspectual operations on verbs in spoken languages

Aspect is associated with “the internal temporal “structure” of a situation” (Payne, 1997:234). Aspect is often manifested in the verb. Bybee’s sample (1985) contains aspectual modulations in the verb in 74 percent of the languages (p. 31). English is a language that has not grammaticalised many aspectual notions, which does not mean they cannot be expressed. Examples as found in (29) express aspect: progressive aspect in (a), imperfective aspect in (b), and inceptive aspect in (c).

(29) (a) He is singing songs. (b) He reads the book. (c) He began walking.

There are many aspectual notions that can be grammaticalised, and one has to keep in mind that they can vary from language to language. Some notions will be exemplified below, but the reader has to remember this list is not exhaustive and that the labels used here are not

10 Although spelled differently, the second and third persons singular have the same form, pronounced /ε/.

27 fixed. Some aspectual notions have several labels, e.g. the progressive aspect is also referred to as the continuous aspect. In some language however, there are slight distinctions between aspectual notions that in other languages exist as one. The perfective aspect views the situation as a whole, not dependent of tense. This in contrast to the imperfective aspect, in which the situation is viewed from within. These two are general types, under which other notions can be hooded (Comrie, 1976). Examples of different realisations can be found below, the aspectual markers printed in bold letters. We will see examples of aspectual notions expressed in isolation, in agglutination, in fusion and via reduplication. Contrast An example of an aspectual imperfective notion is the continuous aspect, also called the progressive aspect. In sentences (30) from Apurinã and (31) from Imbabura Quechua, the continuous is expressed by an affix, examples of agglutination. In (32), the expression of the habitual in Rembarrnga is probably fusional, as Rembarrnga conjugation classes can inflect for seven TAM (Tense, Mood and Aspect) distinctions, and no separate morphemes exist. The affix - nginy indicates both past tense and continuous aspect.

(30) Nhirikananuta. (Apurinã) nh- irika- nanu- ta 1SG- fall- PROGR- VBLZ “I’m falling down.” (Da Silva Facundes, 2001:529) (31) Shamujuni (Imbabura Quechua) shamu- ju- ni come- PROGR-1 “I am coming.” (Cole, 1982:150) (32) Bony yarrmanginy. (Remmbarnga) bony yarr- ma- nginy that’s.all 1A>3- get- PST.CONT “That’s all we were getting.” (Saulwick, 2006:7)

Examples of the perfect aspect can be found in (33) and (34), the Apurinã sentence again being an example of the aspect being expresses by affixation, thus being agglutinative, while the Papiamentu example shows the use of a free morpheme, thus being isolating.

(33) Uru tsapuãtaã umotokapewa. (Apurinã) Ø- uru tsapuãta- ã u- motoka- pe- wa 3M- father fish.hook- INSTR 3M- hook- PF- REFL “He hooked himself in his father’s fish-hook.” (Da Silva Facundes, 2001:523)

28 (34) Nunka mi no a firma un kontrakto. (Papiamentu) nunka mi no a firma un kontrakto. never 1.SG not PF sign a contact “I have never signed a contract.” (Kouwenberg and Murray, 1994:42)

In many languages, aspect is expressed by reduplication. The following Malay examples illustrate full reduplication, but other forms of reduplication can also be found.

(35) Progressive aspect in Malay (a) acan-acan ‘to mimic repeatedly/continuously/always’ from acan ‘to mimic’ (b) gelak-gelak ‘to laugh repeatedly/continuously/always’ from gelak ‘to laugh’ (Hasan, 1974:85)

3.3. Summary

In this chapter, morphological typology and processes in spoken languages have been discussed. The traditional classification has been introduced, as well as the continua that are more often used nowadays to classify languages. We have learned that no ideal example of a language type exists, and that some morphological processes, as compounding and reduplication, are difficult to classify morphologically. In section 3.2, a number of morphological processes in spoken languages have been discussed, and examples have been given of the different ways languages realise these morphological processes. Derivation can be expressed by agglutinative or fusional morphology, or by reduplication. Examples of incorporation have been given, and it has been explained that this process is an intrinsic value of polysynthetic languages. Furthermore, we looked at inflectional processes, and we started with the pluralisation of nouns. We found that it can be expressed via agglutination, via fusion, and via reduplication. Then we turned our attention to verb agreement, and we found examples of agglutination and fusion. Finally, we found that aspect can be expressed by isolation, agglutination, fusion and reduplication. In the following chapter, the focus will turn to signed languages. Many of the notions described above will return in chapter 4. They will be explained and described for signed languages, which will be our starting point in determining the morphological type of signed languages in general.

29 4. Morphological processes in signed languages

In this chapter, we will take a closer look at morphological processes in signed languages. A crucial distinction that can be made is between sequential and simultaneous processes. Overall, the morphology of signed languages is more simultaneous than that of spoken languages, but instances of sequential morphology can be found in signed languages, as well as we can find simultaneity in spoken languages. Morphological processes in sign languages tend to be simultaneous, for modality driven reasons (Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Aronoff et al., 2000, 2005; Lillo-Martin, 2002). Simultaneity in morphological processes either entails stem- internal changes, or suprasegmental affixation. Stem-internal changes occur because of the phonomorphemic status of the morphemes; suprasegmental affixation is found in the non- manual features of a sign. Aronoff et al. (2000) conclude that derivational morphology in signed languages is mainly sign language specific, i.e. differing from one sign language to another, whereas inflectional morphology is sign language universal, i.e. very similar in structure across all signed languages. Derivational morphology is mainly sequential in signed languages, and inflectional morphology is mainly simultaneous in nature. It is therefore possible to differentiate between sequential, sign language specific morphology and simultaneous, sign language universal morphology. For our determination of the morphological language type of signed languages it is important to discuss both types of morphology. We will start with sequential processes, and will take a look at the claims that have been made about affixation in signed languages. In section 4.2, another sequential process will be discussed, namely reduplication. This is made a separate section, as reduplication is the realisation of morphological processes as derivation, number, and aspect. Whereas the sequential processes in section 4.1 show an addition of a suffix, reduplication entails a repetition of (part of) the sign. The section on simultaneous processes (4.3) will start with number incorporation, which has been found in many signed languages. Some have argued that classifier constructions in signed languages are a form of noun incorporation. A section on classifiers is therefore added. Furthermore we will look at inflectional morphology, where the focus again will be on noun, pluralisation, verb agreement and aspectual operations on verbs, as has been discussed for spoken languages. The last section will be dedicated to suprasegmental features in signed languages, namely the non-manual features that signed languages exhibit. These have not

30 been described to be produced sequentially in any signed language; therefore they cannot be discussed in the next section, which deals with sequentiality.

4.1 Sequential processes

In this section we will look at sequential processes in signed languages. As reduplication is considered a separate section, this section will only deal with affixation, which to date has been described for only a few signed languages. Although compounding can be found in many signed languages, it will not be discussed here as signed compounds are, as in spoken languages, difficult to classify morphologically. There exist differences between compounds in spoken languages and in signed languages, one of them being the possibility that sign language compounds do not consist of two noun stems, but of two phonological reduced forms (Liddell and Johnson, 1986). Furthermore, the temporal rhythm of a sign language compound is much shorter than the time frame of the noun phrase. In addition, simultaneous compounds have been described, which have not been described for any spoken language, and it is unlikely we can find them there. Simultaneous, lexicalised compounds are always signed with both hands, of which each represents (the reduced form of) a sign. This is an example of modality specific morphology.

4.1.1 Affixation

Although not common in signed languages, affixes have been identified for a few of them.

For ASL, a negative suffix, glossed as ZERO, adds the meaning ‘not at all’ to the verbal sign it is affixed to. For example, SEE-ZERO means ‘not see at all’. Aronoff, Meir and Sandler (2005) argue that this is a suffix rather than an independent sign because it must occur after the stem. For some of their consultants, its spread is limited, and the verb and suffix are phonologically fused: “non-manual markers […] tend to span both the verb and the suffix; the path movements of both the verb and the suffix either are shortened or coalesce” (Aronoff et al., 2005:329). Besides the fusing of verb and suffix, there is a “phonological constraint on the occurrence of the suffix: it can occur only with one-handed stems” (idem). No such constraint exists for compounds, and therefore this constraint supports the claim that ZERO is a suffix and not an independent word (see Aronoff et al. (2005) for more explanation).

31 And secondly, a morphological constraint has been found, limiting the options to what stem the suffix ZERO can occur with: agreement verbs or verbs of motion cannot take the suffix; it can only be used with plain verbs11. Such a constraint does not exist for compounds. Other affixes that have been identified for ASL are an agentive suffix12, which Liddell

(2003) glosses in line with its English equivalent as –ER, and a form glossed as STRONG which affixes to certain adjectives giving the meaning of ‘habitually’, ‘addictively’, or ‘strongly’. Also the comparative and superlative forms behave like affixes in ASL. Also a set of prefixes was encountered in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) “that is of quite a different nature from any of the affixes described so far” (Aronoff et al., 2005:332). They labelled them informally as ‘sense prefixes’ as native signers glossed them “with words that involve either a sense organ – eyes, nose, or ears – or the head or mouth” (idem). The signs formed with a ‘sense prefix’ are not compounds, for several reasons. It is a limited set – only five forms occur – which can only appear in the first position of complex signs, whereas compounds can be build up with any sign in both position. Another reason for their claim that these are prefixes and not compounds, is the nuance in meaning that some of the prefixes have taken on, and finally, the observation that the prefixes are somewhat interchangeable, which lead Aronoff, Meir and Sandler (2005) to conclude that they all belong to one class.

4.2 Reduplication

Several morphological processes can be realised via reduplication. In signed languages, it has been found, inter alia, to realise aspectual moderations, number and – at least in some signed languages – noun-verb conversion.13 It should be noted that reduplication in signed languages often comprises a backward or circular movement, depending on the form of the sign.

4.2.1 Aspect

One of the first detailed descriptions of aspect was offered by Klima and Bellugi (1979). They give an extensive description of aspectual modulations on ASL predicates14. They explain the

11 See section 4.3.1.3 on agreement in signed languages for a description of these different types of verbs. 12 A similar process exists in NGT, where the sign PERSON can be added to verbal signs. No research has been done about its origin and use, and therefore we cannot say that the NGT sign is a suffix or not. 13 For a description of the use of reduplication in reciprocals, see Pfau and Steinbach (2003). 14 Aspect can not only be marked on verbs, but also on some adjectives and classifiers. It seems that it depends on the meaning of the predicate if, and which, aspectual notions it can inflect for. Predicates as PRETTY or INTELLIGENT seem to inflect less for aspect than predicates as ANGRY and SICK (Klima and Bellugi, 1979). This makes sense at it would be difficult to ‘tend to get pretty’ or ‘get intelligent often’. This first group of adjectival

32 modulations as taking “the form of distinctions in dynamic qualities of movement superimposed on signs – distinctions in speed, tension, length” (p. 245). Rathmann (2005) also studied aspect in ASL, and in both studies many different aspectual notions are given, not all of which will be discussed here. In contrast to the division between perfective and imperfective aspectual notions, we will follow Rathmann’s (2005) distinction of situation and viewpoint aspect. “Situation aspect is concerned with the intrinsic properties of an eventuality or a situation. […] In contrast, viewpoint has to do with how an eventuality is presented linguistically” (Rathmann, 2005: 6-7). He groups the aspectual modulations given by inter alia Klima and Bellugi (1979) under six morphemes. Four of them are of the situational type; they are continuative, iterative, habitual, and hold. Two of them relate to viewpoint: conative and FINISH. We will see that not all labels correspond to the notions we have discussed in section 3.2.3.3, where we looked at aspectual operations in spoken languages. The aspectual morphemes that are phonologically realised in ASL via reduplication are the continuative, the iterative and the habitual. We expect the same phonological realisation, i.e. reduplication, to appear in NGT as well. The continuative is found in many signed languages. “The continuative morpheme adds the meaning that the interval over which the eventuality unfolds is uninterrupted.” (Rathmann, 2005:34). Phonologically, the continuative morpheme is realised by an alteration of the movement of the verb root “in such a way that it is extended for a longer time than the citation form15” (idem, p. 35). This morpheme groups the protractive, durational and continuative aspects coined by Klima and Bellugi (1979). The iterative morpheme heads incessant, frequentative and iterative aspects. It “contributes the meaning that multiple instances of the eventuality unfold in their own interval. A break is possible between each interval” (Rathmann, 2005:37). This morpheme is phonologically realised via an elliptical reduplication of the root. Rathmann (2005:42) defines the habitual morpheme as being “a property that is characterized by a regular repetition of the eventualities and that holds over an interval of time.” Phonologically it is a simple reduplication of the movement of the verb root.

A pictorial description of LOOK-AT in ASL, modulated for the continuative, for iterative, and for habitual aspect can be found in Figure 6.

predicates are, as Klima and Bellugi (1979, p. 252) put it referring to “inherent characteristics or long-lasting qualities” while the second group refers to “incidental or temporary states”. 15 At first, we thought this might also mean a lengthening of the movement and not only reduplication, but later in his dissertation, Rathmann (2005) clarifies that the continuative morpheme uses reduplication (p. 53).

33

continuative iterative habitual

Figure 6: The ASL sign LOOK-AT inflected for continuative, iterative and habitual aspects (Klima and Bellugi, 1979:293)

In section 4.3.1.4 we will look at the hold and conative morphemes, as they are phonologically realised simultaneous to the verb root. The last aspect, namely FINISH, is not expressed with an inflection on the verb, but with a single sign. Clause-final it is a perfective viewpoint morpheme; while preverbal it marks perfect aspect. In the next sections on number and derivation, we will see other instances of reduplication.

4.2.2 Number

Pluralized nouns may also take reduplication. Pfau and Steinbach (2006) describe pluralisation in DGS, and conclude that the plural marking is constrained by the phonological properties of the noun. In DGS, nouns that are body-anchored, i.e. the location is near or on the body, and non-body-anchored nouns with a complex movement take zero marking. Furthermore, non-body-anchored nouns that have a location on the midsagittal axis of the signing space take a simple reduplication, while non-body-anchored nouns that are signed on the lateral side of the signing space get a sideward reduplication (Pfau and Steinbach, 2006). Number agreement on verbs can also be realised via a reduplicated movement. Number agreement on verbs can have several forms. For example, the sign 1GIVEarch means ‘I give them all’ while 1GIVE3a-3b-3c means ‘I give to each of you’ (Zwitserlood and Van Gijn, 2006). As there is debate whether number agreement on verbs in signed languages exists (Keller, 1998; Zwitserlood and Van Gijn, 2006), we will not discuss this further. For our purpose, it is interesting to know that number in signed languages can be realised via reduplication, on both nouns and verbs.

34 4.2.3 Derivation

A third process we can find reduplication in, is derivation. Supalla and Newport (1978) describe derivational processes in ASL. For instance, the difference between the signs CHAIR and SIT, which are similar in all parameters, is that the movement of CHAIR is shorter and repeated than is the movement of SIT. Supalla and Newport (1978) found this difference to hold for many noun-verb pairs, and give examples of the pairs like FLY-AIRPLANE, SWEEP-

BROOM and IRONV-IRONN. They claim that both nouns and verbs are derived from one underlying base. Nouns get a restrained and repeated movement, while it depends on the meaning of the verbs which movement is realised. For instance, verbs with a spatial endpoint are signed with a hold, while those with no spatial end point are signed with a continuous movement. However, as some of the noun-verb pairs are iconic, it could be argued that in those cases the noun is verbalized. Consider for example the pair SWEEP and BROOM. It could be argued that BROOM is at the base of the iconicity, and SWEEP describes the action performed with it.

Without the broom, there would be no sweeping. The same for the pair AIRPLANE and FLY-

AIRPLANE. The verb could be glossed as ‘airplane moving through space’, as the handshape of the verb is the handshape used in the sign AIRPLANE, and also in the classifier referring to

AIRPLANE. Again, without AIRPLANE, the verb FLY-AIRPLANE would not exist. More recently, a study on noun and verb pairs in NGT (Schreurs, 2006) showed that NGT noun-verb pairs do not show a consistent pattern. For only a few pairs, she found a pattern, which is opposite to what Supalla and Newport (1978) found for ASL, namely a shorter and repeated movement in the verb, and a longer movement in the noun.

4.3 Simultaneous processes

The following sections will discuss several simultaneous processes in signed languages. Simultaneity in signed languages can be divided, according to Vermeerbergen, Leeson and Crasborn (2007), in three categories. The first is manual simultaneity, which according to them occurs “when each hand conveys different information” (p. 2). This can occur when one hand holds a sign while the other articulates another sign, but it can also occur when the two hands each sign a lexical item. However, for the purpose of this thesis, this definition is too limited. Therefore, we expand the term manual simultaneity, also including stem-internal changes, i.e. changes in the manual phonetic parameters of a sign. Manual simultaneity thus

35 includes monosyllabic, polymorphemic signs. Section 4.3.1 will focus on morphological processes that are manual simultaneous. The second category is manual-oral simultaneity, which refers to the use of of mouth gestures in combination with a manual sign. A mouthing might carry morphological or lexical information that is not related to the manual sign (Vermeerbergen et al., 2007). The last category of simultaneity subsumes the simultaneous use of other articulators than the hands or the mouth. In a recent volume dedicated to simultaneity in signed languages, examples of this category include the use of eye gaze and body leans with a manual sign. This might also include the use of the mouth, but is not a prerequisite (idem). These last two types of simultaneity will be discussed in section 4.3.2, and no distinction will be made between the second and the third category.

4.3.1 Manual simultaneous processes

In this section, we will first take a look at compounds in signed languages, as for some languages, simultaneous compounds have been described. The second section will deal with incorporation, followed by a description of classifiers. Then we will look at two inflectional processes, namely verb agreement and aspect.

4.3.1.1 Incorporation

In sign language literature, the term incorporation is used for different phenomena. In order to evaluate whether the use is valid, it is useful to keep in mind the definition of noun incorporation: “a morphological construction where a nominal lexical element is added to a verbal lexical element; the resulting construction being a verb and a single word” (De Reuse, 1994:252). Broadening its scope, we define incorporation as ‘a morphological construction where one lexical element is added to another; the resulting construction being a single word’. Harder (1991b) described incorporation in NGT, defining it as a change in one or more parameters, because extra meaning is added in the form of the sign. She specifically focused on the incorporation of number and quality. With the ‘incorporation of quality’, she refers to qualities as size, manner and intensity. For instance, changes in the citation16 form of signs as

BALL, HOUSE and BUILDING inform about the actual size of the referent. If for instance HOUSE is signed higher in signing space and with a larger movement than the citation form, it means

BIG-HOUSE. However, these cases of quality expression are not incorporation. We can say that

16 The citation form of a sign is the base sign, the sign that would be included in dictionaries. It is uninflected.

36 quality is an adjective or an adverb, but as the signs do not consist of two lexical items, this is not incorporation. Number incorporation on the other hand, is a good example of incorporation in signed languages, and can be found in many of them. In all those that it has been described for, it occurs most often with signs denoting time (inter alia Chinchor (1981) and Liddell (1996) for ASL; Sutton-Spence and Woll (1999) for BSL; Massone (1991) for Argentine SL; Fuentes and Tolchinsky (2004) for Catalan SL). The numbers incorporated are the numbers used in the signed language. The process will be illustrated by NGT examples.

Consider the NGT sign WEEK: a bC-handshape, palm facing to the left, fingers pointing away from the signer, moves downward through the signing space. If one wants to say ‘three weeks’, the number THREE is incorporated in the sign: the handshape is changed to a 3- handshape (index, middle and ring fingers extended). This sign means THREE-WEEKS. See

Figure 7 for a pictorial description. This differs from the signed nominal phrase WEEKS THREE in the incorporated element. It is thus possible to sign ‘three weeks’ with or without incorporated number. The first characteristic mentioned in section 3.2.2 thus holds for number incorporation in signed languages: incorporation is optional (after Chinchor, 1981).

WEEK (frontal view) THREE-WEEKS (side view)

17 Figure 7: The signs WEEK and THREE-WEEKS.

Applying the other two characteristics to number incorporation in NGT is somewhat more difficult, as they specifically refer to nouns. The second characteristic, that the distribution is limited, can be applied. Incorporation with the numbers ONE up to FIVE occurs more often than incorporation with the numbers SIX to NINE. Numbers TEN and higher are never incorporated.

17 These pictures are slightly changed from what the signs look like. The sign WEEK is normally signed with the index finger and thumb slightly bent; the sign THREE-WEEKS is normally signed with the palm facing down. They are slightly adapted here to make the pictures clearer for the reader.

37 This is due to their form. The sign TEN has in some dialects the same handshape as five, only with a different orientation and a short movement. Incorporating this handshape will lead to confusion. In other dialects, the sign is two-handed, and two-handed number incorporation is not possible. The signs ELEVEN up to TWENTY have a movement in them, making it impossible to incorporate without losing meaning. Numbers 21 and higher are compounds, e.g. 25 is signed FIVE^TWENTY, following Dutch ‘vijfentwintig’. Exceptions here are the ‘double numbers’ as 22, 33 and 44. For example 22 is signed with an added side to side movement to the number 2. This distribution is expected to hold for many signed languages: number 1-5 are incorporated most often, numbers 6-9 less often, and numbers 10 and higher are not incorporated. A cross-linguistic study on number incorporation in signed languages would have to be done to confirm this properly. See further Chinchor (1981) and Liddell (1996, 2003). Meir (2001) claims finding incorporation in Israeli Sign Language (ISL). She states that verbs, in which the handshape quite iconically contributes to the meaning, are the result of noun or classifier incorporation. Examples are for instance FORK and SPOON which can incorporate into EAT or FEED, forming verbs that she glosses as FORK-EAT or SPOON-FEED. These incorporated verbs are syntactically restricted in that it is not possible for them to have an overt argument in the sentence. In the next chapter (section 5.1) we will discuss this claim extensively.

4.3.1.2 Classifiers

Classifiers have been given many different labels (see Schembri (2003) for a summary of the used terms). All the different terms refer to “forms representing different classes of nominals in combination with other elements. The noun class forms are represented by a set of handshapes, and it is these handshapes that are […] called classifiers” (Sandler and Lillo- Martin, 2006:76). Classifiers can be of one of three types: Size and Shape Specifiers (SASSes) indicate the size and shape of the referent; entity classifiers18 refer to general semantic classes and there is, in some of them, some degree of iconicity; and handling classifiers represent the shape of the hand or some object in the handling of the referent (inter alia Supalla, 1986; Engberg-Pedersen, 1994; Schick, 1990).

18 Supalla (1986) called these semantic classifiers.

38 Several researchers have briefly referred to classifier constructions as being object incorporation. Vermeerbergen (1997) mentions it specifically. She gives VGT examples as

PERSON-FALL and BOOK-FALL. Meir (2001) makes an extensive claim and analyses the changes in handshape as the result of compound or classifier incorporation, depending on the thematic role of the classifier. She bases her analysis on differences in the morphological and syntactic behaviour of theme and instrumental classifiers. In section 5.1 below, it will be explained in more detail, and it will be argued that this is, as proposed by Zwitserlood (2003a) and Zwitserlood and Van Gijn (2006), gender agreement. In this analysis, classifiers are distinguished based on their representation: entity classifiers represent “the noun referent by standing for that referent” (Zwitserlood, 2003b:90) while handling classifiers represent the noun referent indirectly, referring to how the referent is manipulated (Zwitserlood, 2003b). They called the phenomenon gender agreement19 “because the semantics of the genders and the assignment of noun referents to these genders is reminiscent of those in the gender agreement system found in Bantu languages” (Zwitserlood and Van Gijn 2006:201). Furthermore, entity classifiers are a closed set of handshapes, which are semantically related to their referent. They can be put in motion, to represent the movement of the referent (Zwitserlood, 2003b; Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006). To show that classifiers are not sign language universal, we will first give some referential examples in Table 3.

Referent NGT ASL Car B-handshape; palm facing down w-handshape; palm facing sidewards Tree Lower arm and 5-handshape, Lower arm and 5-handshape, upright upright Airplane Y-handshape; palm facing down -handshape; palm facing down Table 3: Classifiers in NGT (from Zwitserlood, 2003b) and ASL (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006) for different referents.

Handling classifiers appear to be more universal among signed languages, but it seems also that what some researchers call handling classifiers, are called SASS-classifiers by others (for

19 Supalla (1982), Glück and Pfau (1998), Pfau and Glück (2000) already recognised the change in handshape as agreement markers, and argued against a classifier incorporation analysis (see below).

39 example the C-classifier, that has been called a handling classifier by, inter alia, Zwitserlood

(2003b) while called a SASS-classifier depicting a cylindrical form by Supalla (1982) and Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006).

Some classifiers refer to several different entities. For example, in NGT, the d-classifier may represent “noun referents that have a long and thin shape, such as pencils, pens, knives, nails” but it can also represent “larger objects that are cylindrical or longer than they are wide” for example shoes, towers and poles (Zwitserlood, 2003b:91). Furthermore, it can also represent “animate referents: human beings […], animals, aliens and inanimate entities given imaginary animacy” (idem).

4.3.1.3 Verb agreement

Before giving a description of the debate to the nature of verb agreement, let us first look at the three different verb classes Padden identified (1990). The first class, plain verbs, “do not inflect for person and number” (Padden 1990:119). The second class is formed by agreement verbs. These inflect for person and number, but they do not take locative affixes. The use of space is morphological, and the space used is syntactic space. The last class of verbs is called spatial verbs. They have locative affixes, and do not inflect for person and number. Furthermore, it has been established for agreement verbs in NGT that there is more often agreement with the object than with the subject (Bos, 1993). This is different from what has been found for spoken languages, where most agreement verbs agree with their subject. NGT follows the predictions of the classical pro drop theory in that it most often shows object drop: the argument the verb most frequently agrees with, is also dropped most frequently. Different views exist on verb agreement in signed languages. Liddell (2000) argues that verb agreement in signed languages is not linguistic but gestural. We have seen sufficient support of the linguistic status of verb agreement (Aronoff et al., 2000, 2005; Lillo-Martin, 2002; Rathmann and Mathur, 2002) and will therefore not follow Liddell. On the one hand we find researchers who analyse verb agreement as being an affixational process (inter alia Meir, 1998; Aarons, Bahan, Kegl and Neidle, 1992), while others analyse it as a process of stem internal changes. For instance, Mathur (2000) and Rathmann and Mathur (2002) see agreement as a process of phonological readjustment. For us, it is important to analyse agreement as a stem-internal change, and we will follow Aronoff et al. (2005) who argue that a verb’s agreement slots are found in the locations. We will return to this analysis in section

40 5.3.2. Here it suffices to understand the way in which signed languages make use of verb agreement. Verb agreement happens in signing space. Signers make use of localisation, usually by using indexes. These occur before, after, both before and after, or simultaneous to the noun that is localised. An index is, simply said, pointing with the index finger to a location in signing space. The analysis best suited to describe verb agreement is to divide the signing space in ‘sections’ that refer to the grammatical category of person. This division makes the signer first person, the addressee second person, and any other referent third person. Schematically, the signing space can be depicted as in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Locations of grammatical person in signing space, indicated by the dotted line.

Verb agreement in signed languages occurs through a change in the citation form of the verb.

Let us consider the NGT sign ASK. The citation form is signed with a slightly bend B- handshape with the fingers turned up and the palm facing the signer. It starts at the chin and moves forwardly away from the signer, while the palm orientation changes to facing upward and to the signer. If one signs ‘I ask him’, the sign changes its movement and end location. It is directed to the side of the signing space, where the object has been located before in discourse. This would be glossed as 1ASK3. If one signs ‘he asks you’, both beginning and end locations change, and thus also the movement. It starts at the location of the subject, at the side of the signing space, and ends at the location of the object, which is directed towards the addressee. This would be glossed as 3ASK2. Some verbs are what has been called ‘backwards verbs’: they start at the location of the object and end at the location of the subject. Examples of NGT are INVITE, CHOOSE and TAKE.

British Sign Language (BSL) adds to this list verbs as BORROW and INTRODUCE. The glossing

41 however, still refers to the start and end locations of the verb. So 1INVITE2 means ‘you invite me’, and not ‘I invite you’. Not found in other descriptions of verb agreement in signed languages, is the agreement for physical gender in , as well as the expression of the exact number on the weak hand (Smith, 1990).20

4.3.1.4 Aspect

As we have seen in section 3.2.3.3 on aspectual operations on verbs in spoken languages, there are many notions that can be grammaticalised. We have already been introduced with Rathmann’s (2005) distinction, and we have seen the continuative, iterative, and habitual morphemes in section 4.2.1 being realised via reduplication. In this section we will look at the realisations of the hold and conative morphemes. We will deal with them in that order. Again, the phonological realisations are those from ASL as described by Rathmann (2005), and we expect them to be realized in NGT similarly. Sutton-Spence and Woll (1999), although labelling them inceptive and cessive instead of conative and hold respectively, describe similar realisations for BSL. The hold morpheme appears most often with verbs of motion that depict this in the signing space. The morpheme means that “the event is interrupted or terminated, without any implication about its completion” (Rathmann, 2005:42). Phonologically, it is realised by a hold of the final configuration, i.e. location of a verb sign. The conative morpheme on the other hand is realised by a hold of the initial configuration of the verb. This morpheme means that “there is an attempt for the eventuality to be carried out” (Rathmann, 2005:47). Both the hold and conative aspect morphemes are highly iconically realised. Other simultaneous aspectual modulations exist, which Rathmann (2005) grouped as not having an aspectual morpheme as these modulations ‘comment’ on the activity, and not “necessarily reveal the internal temporal structure of the event nor present a particular viewpoint on the event” (p. 49). One group is formed by modulations that represent adverbs or manner or degree, the other are distributional modifications. An example of an adverbial

20 Gender is expressed by an A-handshape, which “signifies that the object of the verb is a human being” (Smith, 1990, p. 214). It can be replaced by an I-handshape, indicating the object is a female human being. Taiwan SL (TSL) also make use of two markers that are semantically more restricted: [BROTHER] and [SISTER]. They can only be used if immediately preceded by a sign that is semantically similar. The expression of number is not the , i.e. singular or plural, but TSL verbs can actually incorporate a number marker. The weak hand takes the handshape of one of the five number markers in TSL: ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, and MANY (more than five). The fingertips of the strong hand are oriented toward the weak hand marking the number.

42 modification is the intensive. In ASL this is formed by lengthening the beginning or final hold of a sign, in contrast to the intensive aspect in Israeli Sign Language (ISL), which is formed by a lengthening of the movement (Aronoff et al., 2000).

4.3.2 Simultaneous processes involving non-manual features

Another simultaneous construction that can be found in signed languages is the production of non-manual features. Although there is much to say about non-manual features, and this term comprises inter alia the actions of the mouth, the eyes, the eyebrows and body leans. For the purpose of this thesis, the focus will be on the actions of the head and of the mouth. The terminology will be used that was agreed upon in the Second Intersign Workshop in Leiden, the Netherlands in 1998, and which was published in Boyes-Braem and Sutton- Spence (2001). The term mouthings will be used for mouth patterns derived from spoken language, and the term mouth gestures will refer to mouth patterns from within sign languages. Mouthings have primarily a phonological function, although spreading occurs, inter alia for prosodic and discourse reasons (Sutton-Spence, 2007). They hardly ever have morphological function, and therefore we will not discuss them here. Non-manual features can have several functions. In phonology, they can function as an intrinsic part of a sign, or, as we have seen in chapter 2, the non-manual part can distinguish a minimal pair. In morphology, they can have adjectival function, adding information to the manual sign, while in syntax they can change the type of sentence. In examples (1)-(3) we find a few possibilities of the non-manual as a morphemic marker. The non-manual level is represented in glossing on a line above the glosses of the manual parts. Examples are from NGT. Mouth gestures are transcribed by their morphological function; mouthings are not transcribed.

augm (1) YESTERDAY RAIN+++ “Yesterday, it rained very hard.” dim (2) INDEX BALL RED INDEX “That is a small, red ball.” neg (3) INDEX2 HOUSE GO INDEX2 “You are not going home.”

The augmentative and diminutive morphemes are used as either adverbs or adjectives. The augmentative consists of puffed cheeks, squinted eyes, and a brow furrow. The diminutive

43 morpheme consists of a mouth pout, and sucked in cheeks. These descriptions show that the non-manual markers are a combination of several facial settings. The negative non-manual morpheme, a headshake, has been seen as a syntactic marker. We will follow Pfau (2004) and Pfau and Quer (2002, in press) who argue that headshake is a negative affix, and that its spreading is prosodic. Non-manual markers are mainly bound morphemes, as they cannot occur without a manual sign (see example (4)). An exception is the negative marker, which can be used without manual part, in answer to a yes/no-question for example (5).

dim (4) *BALL Ø ‘a small ball.’ neg (5) Ø ‘No.’

Many manner and degree adverbs are expressed via non-manual features. Sutton-Spence and Woll (1999) describe the most important markers in BSL, six of which are copied here in Figure 9 with their meanings below the picture. These non-manuals, mainly mouthings, have been accounted for in other signed languages as well, denoting the same adverbials.

Intense Long, large Small

Average Exact Unpleasant

Figure 9: Non-manual adverbs in BSL (Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999:86-87).

44 4.4 Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at the different morphological processes that take place in signed languages. We have seen the sequential process of affixation. It has been explained that reduplication can be the realisation of several morphological processes, and examples were given of aspectual and number inflections, and of derivation. Finally, we looked at simultaneous processes, which were divided into processes of manual simultaneity and processes involving non-manual morphemes. The morphological processes that show manual simultaneity are number incorporation, classifier constructions, verb agreement and a number of aspectual inflections, that are realized by changing the movement or locations of the predicate sign. The final section discussed the use non-manual morphemes simultaneously with a manual part of a sign. In the next chapter, the morphological processes described in this chapter will be classified morphologically. It will be argued that the main part of sign language morphology is agglutinative, but that a distinction has to be made between sequential agglutination and simultaneous agglutination.

45 5. Discussion Only a few authors have made attempts of a typological classification of sign language morphology. Bellugi and Klima (1982) for instance, suggested that ASL can be compared in typology to polysynthetic spoken languages. They proposed this comparison on the basis of the morphological complexity of ASL, claiming that signs are multi-layered, consisting of a root and its derivational and/or inflectional patterns, which occur simultaneously in space. Erlenkamp (2000) on the other hand suggested that DGS morphology was partly isolating, partly fusing. Schwager (2004) suggests that is not isolating, because it shows inflection. From these few suggestions, we can see that there is much disagreement. Therefore, it is appropriate to examine the morphological types and see whether we can find examples of each in the morphology of different signed languages, based on the previous chapter. In this chapter, we will apply the morphological language types to parts of the sign language data. As has been stated in the chapter dedicated to the morphological typology and morphological processes in spoken languages (chapter 3), it is difficult to find an ideal example of any of the four types. Therefore, it should not be surprising if it turned out that signed languages too, cannot be categorized as belonging to only one of the morphological types. Because of this, we will be searching for examples of all the different types in signed languages. We will see that most signed strings show agglutinative morphology, and that some show isolating morphology, while fusional morphology is very rare in signed languages. We have found a few examples of incorporation, and they will be discussed below. However, as was discussed in section 3.1.1, it is difficult to determine the amount of incorporation needed for labelling morphology polysynthetic, and which types of incorporation are allowed. We will therefore rule out polysynthetic as a possible morphological type. We will discuss the phenomena to deny the claim that sign language classifiers are an example of incorporation in signed languages, and to rule out the polysynthetic type as a possibility for the morphological type of signed languages.

5.1 Incorporating features in signed languages

Although there are few instances of incorporation in signed languages, we cannot classify all of these as polysynthetic signs. As we have seen in section 4.3.1.1 on number incorporation, this is a proper example of incorporation in signed languages. Typically, in polysynthetic languages, a word consists not only of a stem and an incorporated element, but also of other grammatical elements. Simple numeral incorporated signs, e.g. THREE-WEEKS, FOUR-MONTHS,

46 will not be classed polysynthetic as they lack a grammatical element. However signs as IN-

THREE-WEEKS or TWO-YEARS-AGO are polysynthetic. These examples are found in BSL. As the other signs with number incorporation, they are monosyllabic. The time reference in these signs is quite iconic: a forward movement for the signs that denote future, a backward movement for the signs that denote past tense21. The agglutination occurs simultaneously, leading to simultaneous polysynthetis in the case of IN-THREE WEEKS and TWO-YEARS-AGO. These signs are polysynthetic as they are an agglutinated string of lexical stems and a grammatical affix. We will now leave number incorporation and turn to other claims of incorporation in signed languages, namely classifier constructions. Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) conclude in line with Zwitserlood (2003b) that classifiers in signed languages can best be compared to verbal classifiers in spoken languages. Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) also discuss Mithun’s (1984) proposal that “verbal classifiers in spoken language evolved from a morphological structure called Noun Incorporation” (p. 84). They argue that, although no noun is present in signed languages from which classifiers could be derived, in the early days of each signed language a similar form might have existed that had nominal function. In contrast to the claim that classifiers should be compared to verbal classifiers, Meir (2001) claims that verbs, in which the handshape iconically contributes to the meaning, as in classifier constructions, are instances of compound or classifier incorporation. As verb classifiers are ‘verb qualifiers’ and non-referential, they already share two properties with incorporated nouns (Meir, 2001). She argues that “[t]he arguments associated with the classifiers bear the thematic roles of themes or instrumentals” (p. 303) and that these two classifier types differ in syntactic and morphological behaviour. For instance, theme classifiers allow for doubling (see example (1)), while instrumental classifiers do not (see examples (2) and (3)). The doubled NP is underlined.

(1) BOOK INDEXb HEa aGIVE-CL:flatC1 “He gave me this book.”

(2) I BABY INDEXa 1SPOON-FEEDa “I fed the baby with a spoon.”

(3) * I SPOON BABY INDEXa 1SPOON-FEEDa “I fed the baby with a spoon.” (= ‘I spoon-fed the baby with a spoon.’) (Meir, 2001:304)

21 BSL, and many other signed languages for that matter, make use of time lines. Without going into much detail, time adverbials moving forward denote future; moving backward, to the back of the signer, denote past tense. See Brennan (1983) for time lines in BSL, and Schermer and Koolhof (1990) for time lines in NGT.

47 Furthermore, “[t]he two types of classifiers differ with respect to their morphological status: theme classifiers are affixes, while instrumental classifiers are noun roots” (Meir, 2001:306). In Table 4 below, a part of Meir’s (2001) table 1 is repeated.

Theme classifiers Instrumental classifiers

CL:C ‘a cylindrical object’ SPOON (SPOON-FEED) CL:flat C ‘a wide flat object’ FORK (FORK-EAT) CL:BB ‘cubic object’ KNIFE (KNIFE-CUT) CL:B ‘vehicle’ HAMMER (HAMMER-BREAK) CL:F ‘grasp a thin object’ KEY (KEY-OPEN/CLOSE)

Table 4: Theme and instrumental classifiers in ISL (adapted from Meir, 2001:303).

Because of their different morphological and syntactic behaviour, Meir (2001) claims that theme and instrumental classifiers fit well into the incorporation typology suggested by Rosen (1989). Meir claims theme classifiers to be an instance of classifier NI, “i.e., a lexical process where the incorporated morpheme does not satisfy an argument of the verb, thus allowing for doubling and stranding” (Meir, 2001:310), while instrumental classifiers are an instance of compound NI, where the “instrumental argument is satisfied within the V + N complex” (idem). What Meir (2001) analysed as compound NI, has been analysed as derivation by Supalla and Newport (1978). As has been argued in section 4.2.3, it might be that their original analysis of noun-verb pairs cannot be applied to derivation in other signed languages. They suggest that one underlying base is used to derive both the verb and the noun from, but as some verbs could not exist without the noun, it could be argued that they have undergone a process of verbalisation. Consider again the pair BROOM and SWEEP. In section 4.2.3, we briefly argued that ‘if it were not for the broom, there would be no sweeping.’ However, the problem might be more complicated than the iconicity of the noun. A problem that is often encountered in linguistics is the glossing and the translation (Slobin, 2006). How do you translate without losing meaning? The sign SWEEP is probably glossed as SWEEP because it has been recognised as a verb that in English would translate to SWEEP. It could also be glossed as

ACTION-PERFORMED-WITH-A-BROOM, making the handshape in this verbal construction an instrumental classifier, as in Meir’s (2001) analysis, which she claims to be compound NI. However, another important property of noun incorporation, whether classifier or compound incorporation, is that the process is optional. It is possible to express the meaning

48 with incorporated noun, but also without, thus with a noun phrase (Baker, 1988). Classifier constructions cannot be expressed by separate noun phrases, making Meir’s (2001) analysis somewhat difficult to accept. Nor can ACTION-PERFORMED-WITH-A-BROOM be expressed in a noun phrase, or even without the noun BROOM. Another example from NGT is given below, example (4) being grammatical with a classifier handshape in the verb form GIVE agreeing with the sign FLOWER; example (5) being ungrammatical. To illustrate that numeral incorporation is a true example of incorporation, examples (6) is an NGT sentence with incorporated number, while example (7) is the same meaning expressed by a noun phrase.

(4) INDEX1 FLOWER 1GIVE-CLF2 (5) *INDEX1 FLOWER 1GIVE2 “I give you a flower.”

(6) THREE-WEEKS PAST INDEX1 COMPUTER BUY (7) WEEK THREE PAST INDEX1 COMPUTER BUY “Three weeks ago, I bought a computer.”

Based on Meir’s (2001) examples, both theme and instrument classifiers can also be analysed as gender agreement markers, as Zwitserlood (2003b) and Zwitserlood and Van Gijn (2006) argued for NGT verbs as FALL and GIVE. They compare classifiers to verbal classifiers as found in Bantu languages for instance. Below in (8) an example from Luvale, in which the agreement markers are printed in bold.

(8) (a) Vi- fuhwa vy- enyi vy- osena vy- acilikikile (Luvale) NC:4P- bone NC:4P- POSS NC :4P- all NC:4P- became.crushed “All his bones were broken.” (b) Mu- nwe we- nyi u- mwe u- najimbi CL:2S finger CL:2S- POSS CL:2S- one CL:2S- has.swollen “His finger is swollen.” (Horton, 1949 in Zwitserlood, 2003b:184-185)

This analysis can also be applied to the ‘derived verbs and nouns’. In that analysis, we take the noun referent to be represented by a classifier in the verb. In some cases this will be an entity classifier (FLY-AIRPLANE), while in others it will be a handling classifier (ACTION-

PERFORMED-WITH-A-BROOM). In all cases, it is the Theme argument that is expressed by gender agreement. Although we would not want to analyse classifiers as incorporation, and their lexical status is debatable, it might be that classifier constructions are polysynthetic. Polysynthetic morphology is, as a reminder, morphology which allows for two lexical elements to appear in

49 one word. Although classifiers are part of the productive lexicon of signed languages (inter alia Supalla, 1982; Zwitserlood, 2003b), they represent lexical items. In a construction with two classifiers, there are two lexical items represented. However, as classifiers are not lexical bases, it is debatable whether they are an example of polysynthetic morphology. From a different viewpoint we could also take the stand that the traditional definition of polysynthetic morphology should be reviewed. This will be material for further research. We will now continue with a description of isolation in signed languages, as a small number of examples of isolation can be found in signed languages. In section 5.3 we will learn that most signs are polymorphemic.

5.2 Isolating features in signed languages

The morphology of a language is isolating when each word consists of one morpheme. Sign language lexicons also contain monomorphemic signs, which implies that we can find examples of isolation in signed languages. Signed strings with monomorphemic signs occur, but are not the most common. Some examples from NGT which involve signs that are manually isolating can be found below in (9)-(10). No non-manual features are glossed, as these would make the sentences morphologically complex.

(9) TODAY INDEX1 BIKE BUY “Today, I bought/buy/will buy a bike.”

(10) TODAY INDEX1 TEAM VOLLEYBALL “Today my team played/plays/will play volleyball.”

Both examples (9) and (10) are ambiguous. As NGT does not inflect for tense, sentences with the sign TODAY are ambiguous when taken out of context, as they can be read as a present, past or future tense reading. As was indicated in chapter 4, some of the aspectual notions are not expressed by inflection. They are expressed by aspectual markers, which are signed in isolation. Examples are the perfect marker ALREADY in ISL (Meir, 1999) and the completive aspect markers in

Russian Sign Language, glossed as ZAKONCHENO ‘finished’ and GOTOVO ‘ready’ (Grenoble,

1992), and in BSL FINISH and BEEN (Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999). Completion markers can also be found in NGT KLAAR ‘finished’ and in , as for example TAKAM ‘done’ in example (11).

50 (11) BEN OKUL TAMAM Index1 school done “I have finished school.” (Zeshan, 2003:50)

A part of the sign language morphology can thus be called isolating. However, as most signed sentences have a non-manual part, isolated signs in a string are rare. A combination of a manual and a non-manual part is no longer a monomorphemic item, which makes the classification of sign language morphology as being isolating practically impossible. In the next section, we will see that agglutination occurs more often, and different types of polymorphemic signs will be analysed. The reader has to be aware of the fact that other agglutinating languages also have instances of isolation in their morphology. Signed languages are thus not exceptional.

5.3 Agglutinative features in signed languages

When we look at the morphological processes discussed for signed languages in the previous chapter, we can see that they create polymorphemic signs. It is tempting to think that these processes are examples of fusional morphology, as the morphemes are added simultaneously. However, in this section we will argue that the morphological processes are agglutinative. The term agglutinative morphology is applicable to words in which it is possible to segment the morphemes in a polymorphemic word. This has traditionally been regarded as sequential morphology, while fusional morphology was regarded as simultaneous because of the fusion of morphemes to one morpheme. In the definition of agglutinative morphology, however, there is no requirement included referring to sequentiality. The distinction between agglutination and fusion is to be found in the divisibility of the morphemes: if it possible to segment the morphemes from one another, the morphology is agglutinative. If this is not possible, the morphology is fusional. In the following sections, we will apply this to sign language morphology and we will argue that sign language morphology is agglutinative. Before starting our analysis, it is useful to keep in mind the two types of syllable in signed languages, as this will be important for the description of the simultaneous morphological processes: LML (Location – Movement – Location) and L (Location). We can see that the sequential morphological processes result in polysyllabic signs22, and the simultaneous

22 Number agreement on verbs results in polymorphemic signs, but as some are monosyllabic, and some signs polysyllabic, they will not be included in our analysis. We assume that the arguments will be clear without the illustration of this morphological process.

51 processes result in monosyllabic signs. Brentari (2002) gives the following division of languages based on their canonical word shape:

Monosyllabic Polysyllabic Monomorphemic Chinese English Polymorphemic Sign languages West Greenlandic

Table 5: Canonical word shape according to the number of syllables and morphemes per word (Brentari, 2002:57).

For our analysis of the morphological processes, we will follow the distinction between polysyllabic and monosyllabic signs. As the analysis of the former group is similar to spoken language agglutination, we will start there.

5.3.1 Polysyllabic polymorphemic signs

The morphological processes that lead to polymorphemic and polysyllabic signs are affixation, the reduplicative aspectual notions and the pluralisation of nouns. Reduplication is difficult to class morphologically, because the form of the reduplicated material depends on the form of the root. This characteristic of reduplication can be found in spoken as well as in signed languages. Therefore reduplication will not be taken into account in our morphological analysis. The rare instances of affixation in signed languages (see section 4.1.1) are very similar to sequential affixation in spoken languages. The ASL and ISL examples we have seen all result in polysyllabic signs. It consists of a root and a bound morpheme, and as in spoken languages, we classify this process as agglutinative.

5.3.2 Monosyllabic polymorphemic signs

Polymorphemic signs that are monosyllabic are formed by verb agreement, by the aspectual modulations that are simultaneous, and also by classifier morphemes. Moreover, forms that have a non-manual morpheme are also monosyllabic. Each of these processes leads to a change in one of the parameters of the base sign: location (verb agreement), handshape (classifiers), movement (aspect), and non-manual features, giving the phonemes morphological status (phonomorphemes). Therefore, it might seem that these morphological processes are fusional, but we will show that the different morphemes can be segmented, and that the morphology is thus agglutinative.

52 Let us first look at verb agreement. We will take the view that agreement is a simultaneous process, and not the view that it is a process involving affixation. The citation form of a verb that agrees with both subject and object can be described as μVERBμ. The μ refers to morpheme, which in this case refers to φ-features with which a verb agrees. This verb is of the LML-syllabic type, where both begin and end locations are unspecified. Aronoff, Meir and Sandler (2005) schematically represent agreement verbs as in Figure 10, where HC stands for hand configuration, L for location, M for movement and agr for agreement.

Figure 10: Verb agreement as simultaneous morphology in sign language (Aronoff et al, 2005:311).

We will follow the analysis of inter alia Zwitserlood and Van Gijn (2006) that these φ- features are loci. This means that the beginning and end location of the verb, which are unspecified in its citation form, become specified by the location features of the subject and the object of the verb. If we depict this description in a schematic representation of signing space, the verb, represented by the arrow, would move as in Figure 11. If the verb would agree with a subject and an object, e.g. with a second person subject and a third person object, it would move as depicted in Figure 12.

53

Figure 11: Schematic representation of the Figure 12: Schematic representation of the movement of the citation form of a verb. movement of an inflected verb.

Thus because of the agreement with subject and object locations the verb is no longer unspecified for beginning and end location: 2VERB3a. And as the sign’s locations are specified, the movement of the citation form changes. This monosyllabic, inflected verbal sign has several morphemes, and although combined simultaneously, they can be segmented. If one of the morphemes changes, the form of the verb changes. If, for instance, the verb would agree with a third person subject and a second person object, the movement of the verb would be inversed, and we would transcribe it as 3aVERB2. The movement parameter thus has morphological status, but it is possible to identify the phonomorpheme. Ditransitive verbs not only take location agreement, but also gender agreement, a term coined by Zwitserlood (2003b) and Zwitserlood and Van Gijn (2006), and explained above in section 4.3.1.2. In Figure 13 we can see the verb GIVE agreeing with two different direct objects. In the picture on the left, the object is a cylindrical entity, for example a cup. The agreement marker is a C-handshape, which represents the handling of the cylindrical shape.

In the picture on the left, the object is a thin entity, for example a flower. The agreement marker is a t-handshape, which represents the handling of the long, thing shape of a flower.

If, for example, it was a bunch of flowers, the handshape could be the same as for the cup.

DO = cup DO = flower

Figure 13: The ditransitive verb GIVE inflected for two different direct objects (DO).

54 The handshape in these verbs has morphological status, and it changes when the referent changes. The morpheme is identifiable, and the signs described above are therefore agglutinative. Not all ditransitive verbs take gender agreement. According to Zwitserlood (2003a) this is because of the phonological specifications. Non-agreeing ditransitive verbs are phonologically specified for location and hand configuration, while fully agreeing verbs are unspecified23. Zwitserlood (2003b) also argues that there is a morphological basis because “the location and hand configuration slots contain morphemes with specified phonological features. Therefore, these slots cannot be used for agreement morphology” (Zwitserlood and Van Gijn 2006:206). Another example of gender agreement, i.e. a change in handshape, can be found in classifier constructions. In these constructions, the motion and location of the referent are represented in the sign. They are unspecified verbs, and have no lexical status of their own.

Consider for example the classifier construction PERSONCL-MOVES-FROM-LEFT-TO-RIGHT. In

NGT, this is signed by a d-handshape (upright index finger only) that moves through signing space from left to right. The sign is polymorphemic, as both the handshape and the movement carry meaning. The handshape is the classifier referring to a person; the movement iconically represents how the actual movement of the person looked like. Both parameters have morphological status. In classifier constructions we can also encounter a simultaneous signing of two independent classifier signs, for example BIKECL-CRASHES-INTO-CARCL. “In structures involving classifiers, the dominant and non-dominant hands each have morphological status” (Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006:79). So far, we have looked at morphological changes in the location and in the handshape parameters. As we have seen in section 4.3.1.4, simultaneous aspectual modulations consist of a lengthening of either of the locations of the sign, or of a lengthening of the movement. We can analyse both modulations similarly to our analysis of verb agreement. As we have already discussed the specification of locations, we will explain the simultaneous aspectual modulation that is formed by a change in the movement24, namely the intensive aspect in Israeli SL. We can say that the movement of the root is unspecified, and can thus take aspectual specification. Extending Aronoff, Meir and Sandler’s (2005) figure 2, repeated here

23 Note that this claim extends to intransitive and transitive verbs in NGT, but they will not be discussed here. 24 Also, as Rathmann (2005) already claimed the aspectual modulations to be morphemes, we do not feel it is necessary to repeat this here.

55 in Figure 10 above, we can also see aspectual inflection in the representation. The full figure would then look as depicted in Figure 14.

Figure 14: Intensive in ISL: unspecified M analysis.

As mentioned above, some ditransitive verbs are also unspecified for hand configuration. As can be seen in Figure 14, the hand configuration ‘spreads’ over both locations and over the movement if a ditransitive verb takes gender agreement. We can thus segment each morpheme in a morphological complex sign, even though each morpheme is a parameter. Let us now look at the non-manual part of a sign. As was explained in section 4.3.2, non- manual features can have morphemic status as well as phonetic and syntactic status. We will focus on the non-manual morphemes here. Consider the sentences from NGT in (12) and (13):

dim (12) YESTERDAY INDEX1 PLANT BUY “Yesterday, I bought a small plant.”

neg (13) INDEX2 HOUSE GO INDEX2 “You are not going home.”

In (12) and (13) the non-manual parts have morphological function. In both cases, the non- manual part of the sign is not lexical, and both are bound morphemes. As it is possible to segment the morphemes, and even delete or replace them, this is also agglutinative morphology. Non-manual morphemes are affixes that occur simultaneous to the morpheme(s) they are affixed to. They are so-called suprasegmental affixes. We can also find suprasegmental affixes in spoken languages. For example, Payne (1997) uses the example of Sabaot, repeated here in (14), which has a suprasegmental morpheme, namely ‘advanced tongue root’ that has aspectual value. In Shilluk, changes in tone denote

56 changes in “aspect, verb valency and word order” (Gilley, 2004:6). The following examples, indicate the change in aspect (imperfective/perfect) and thematic role (benefactive).

(14) Expression of aspect in Saboat (a) k mny n té ka- a- mnyaan- aa- t- ATR PST- 1.SG- be.sick- STAT- DIR- IMPF “I went being sick (but I am not sick now).” (b) káámnyáánáát ka- a- mnyaan- aa- PST- 1.SG- be.sick- STAT- DIR “I became sick while going away (and I’m still sick).” (Payne, 1997:29) (15) Expression of aspect in Shilluk (a) ānéy cwott kī dhánh Aney NE.IMPF.BEN- call IND person “Someone is calling a person for Aney.” (b) ānéy wòtt kī dhánh Aney NE.PF.BEN- call IND person “Someone called a person for Aney.” (c) ānéy wōtt kī dhánh Aney NE.IMPF- call IND person “Aney is calling a person.” (Gilley, 2004:5)

According to Gilley (2004) it is difficult to determine what tone denotes which change in Shilluk. Similarly, Payne (1997) says that Saboat aspect is an example of fusion because one cannot isolate the specific chunks of morphology. However, it is possible to say that in Saboat, aspect is realised by the appropriate adding of the ATR-morpheme, and that in Shilluk the different changes in tone denote either imperfective and benefactive, or perfective and benefactive, or simply imperfective. In these examples, the tone changes are morphemes, which are, in contrast to the other morphemes in the language, added simultaneously. We analyse these examples of tone changes as agglutinative, similar to the non-manual features of signed languages. Both tonal changes as well as non-manual features are examples of suprasegmental simultaneity. Another type of simultaneity is segmental simultaneity. We have already seen this extensively in the changes in a sign’s parameter. Segmental simultaneity is to be found in stem-internal changes. We can find it in spoken languages also, as for example in German, where umlaut can express the plurality of some nouns, as for example Vater (father) – Väter (fathers). Umlaut or ablaut are thus examples of segmental simultaneity in spoken languages.

57 Summarizing, we see that most morphology in signed languages is agglutinative, which occurs by simultaneous affixation. It can be represented as a stem with multi-layered morphemes, which are simultaneous affixes. A ditransitive verb that agrees for gender and both locations, and has the possibility to inflect for simultaneous aspect, can be schematically represented as in Figure 15. A non-manual adverb has also been included.

[non-manual]μ [aspect]μ [location agreement]μ [gender agreement]μ [stem]μ SIGN Figure 15: Schematic representation of a multi-layered polymorphemic sign.

We will label this simultaneous agglutination, a term that can also be used for tonal changes or umlaut/ablaut in some spoken languages. A schematic representation of a sequential is depicted in Figure 16. The word to which the representation is based is gelmiyordum, as represented in (16).

{[stem] μ[negation] μ[aspect] μ[tense] μ[person agreement] μ}WORD

Figure 16: Schematic representation of a polymorphemic word.

(16) gel- mi- yor- d- um (Turkish) come- NEG- PROGR-PST- 1 “I was not coming.” (Lyovin, 1997:17)

Although the morphemes are simultaneously added to the stem, the morphology of signed languages is also not fusional. In the next section, we will look for fusional features in signed languages.

58 5.4 Fusional features in signed languages

Finding examples of fusion in signed languages is difficult. It might seem that polymorphemic, monosyllabic signs are fusional, but as discussed above they should be analysed as agglutinative signs. If we analyse suppletive morphology as extreme instances of fusional morphology, we can find a few examples of fusional morphology in signed languages. An example from NGT is the sign HAPPEN. This sign is signed with two flat hands, with the palm mainly turned toward the signer, while the fingers point to the other hand. The hands have a circling, forward movement around each other. In addition, the sign HAPPENED exists. The difference with

HAPPEN is that for HAPPENED, the movement is backward. If we would say that HAPPEN is signed on a time line (see footnote 20), then we could say that HAPPENED is inflected for tense and follows the time line. However, in no other verb a similar past tense form exists. For example the sign CYCLE, which also has a forward circling movement, has no past tense form

*CYCLED.

Another example can be found in BSL. The sign HAVE, which is signed in front of the 25 chest with a closing fist, has a suppletive negative form HAVE-NOT , signed with a flat hand, palm to the signer and fingers pointing up, moving sideward in front of the mouth. Other signs might be thought to be fusional, as they express several meanings in one sign, and cannot be segmented. For example, idioms express more than one meaning. Idioms are “phrases that are specific to and an established part of one language” which have “a literal and a figurative meaning” (Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999:186). In spoken languages, idioms are often phrases of several words, but in signed languages they are often single signs. Examples are JAW-DROP ‘being very surprised’ and PUT-EARS-DOWN ‘put in one’s place’ from BSL

(Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999), and THAT’S-HIM ‘there’s the person I was talking about before’ from VGT. Also what have been called multi-channel signs have no ready meaning when they are translated. Examples from BSL are COULD-HAVE-HAPPENED, and the sign DON’T-

UNDERSTAND-AT-ALL that can be found in both BSL and NGT. The difference with idioms is that multi-channel signs only have literal meaning (idem). However, the problem here is that fusional morphology is mainly about grammatical meanings that are expressed by one morpheme, and not lexical meanings. Consider the Latin nominal affixes that denote gender, number as well as case. These three ‘meanings’ are

25 This sign has also been glossed as NOT-EXIST. HAVE can indicate either possession or existence.

59 grammatical, in another language they might be expressed by three different morphemes. The sign COULD-HAVE-HAPPENED denotes a lexical meaning (happen) and grammatical meanings (mood and aspect). Another problem we run into here, is the limitations of glossing. Translation always has it downsides. In BSL, the meaning ‘could have happened’ is one sign. In English, it consists of three words. Would we therefore classify this as a morphological complex sign? In no case would we want to analyse one language by placing the meanings and linguistics of another on top of it. For the same reason we would not want to analyse an English word, e.g. ‘queue’, based on the translation in BSL, or in Dutch. If we would, this word would be morphologically complex as well. So we will not analyse multi-channel signs or idioms as fusional signs, nor will we analyse them as polysynthetic signs. We will leave it for further research to study these types of signs more thoroughly.

5.5 Summary: the morphological classification of signed languages

As will be clear from our analysis above, signed languages are highly agglutinative languages. I agree with Schwager (2004) who concludes that Russian SL belongs to a mixed language type which is uncommon for spoken languages, namely a “merkmalsflektierend- agglutinierenden Mischtyp, wobei die Agglutination auch simultan-mehrdimensional determiniert ist”26 (p. 68). As we have shown, a large part of the agglutinative morphology of signed languages occurs simultaneously. We are therefore in need of a two-fold distinction of the agglutinative end of the index of synthesis. The first is the already known continuum of the index of fusion. The placement of a language on this continuum depends on the amount of morphological fusion in the language. The second is what we propose to call the index of simultaneity. The placement on this continuum depends on the amount of simultaneous agglutination in a language. As we know now, agglutination denotes that morphemes are easily segmented. Signed languages are, as has been demonstrated, agglutinative languages. However, the agglutination occurs simultaneously as well as sequentially. Signed languages as a group are to be placed more to the simultaneous end of this continuum, as they also allow for sequential agglutination. As signed languages differ in their morphology, it will be possible that one signed language is placed more towards the simultaneous end of the continuum than another. Nyst (2007) for

26 My translation: an inflecting-agglutinative mixed type, in which the agglutination is also determined as simultaneous-multidimensional.

60 example states that is less simultaneous than, for example, NGT and ASL. Signed languages have been compared in morphology to polysynthetic languages (Bellugi and Klima, 1982) and Semitic languages (inter alia Aronoff et al. 2005, Sandler and Lillo- Martin, 2006), as both make use of templates and infixes in inflection. Fernald and Napoli (2000) however warn us not to forget the distinction between Semitic and ASL morphology: the root of Semitic verbs and nouns cannot exist on its own. ASL predicates that inflect for aspect are fully formed signs and can be used without the aspect. Their claim, however, is only applicable to inflections for aspect; verbal signs cannot be used without the inflections for gender or location agreement. We argue that, apart from sign language morphology being templatic27, sign language morphology can also be compared to the morphology of tonal languages, as the morphology is agglutinative, but simultaneous. Tone changes in some languages can also be placed on the continuum of simultaneity: the suprasegmental change, namely the tone, can be segmented from the segmental level (words). Naturally, it depends on the segmentability of the tone changes whether the morphology is simultaneous agglutinative or fusional. The examples of Saboat and Shilluk are simultaneous agglutinative as far as we can tell, but there will be other examples of tonal changes that are not.

27 See Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) for supporting arguments.

61 6. Conclusion In this thesis, we examined signed languages typologically, as a typological analysis of signed languages did not exist. When a spoken language is described, often one starts with the morphological typology of the language under study. We assume that the simultaneous nature of signed languages has puzzled researchers. However, the simultaneous nature of sign language morphology does not prohibit a segment-per-segment analysis. We have therefore discussed morphological typology and morphological processes in signed languages as well as in spoken languages. The four traditional morphological language types were introduced, and we have looked for examples of each type in signed languages. We conclude that signed languages are agglutinative languages, as it is clear that the morphemes in a sign, although phonomorphemic, can be segmented easily. We also conclude that we are in need of a new typological index. We have labelled this the index of simultaneity, which is applicable to both signed languages as well as spoken languages, for instance tone languages. As we have seen in the section on incorporation in signed languages, we believe it would be interesting to conduct a cross-linguistic study on the possibilities of incorporation in signed languages. We expect that the generalisations made in section 4.3.1.1 on number incorporation in signed languages will hold, and we assume that the non-dominant hand might be an important articulator when it comes to incorporation in signed languages. In our description on aspectual modulations, we have mainly followed the inflections of ASL. It would be interesting to study aspect cross-linguistically in signed languages, to see whether the same aspect takes the same inflection across signed languages. We assume that many aspectual inflections are somewhat iconically based. Research will either confirm this assumption or not. Until now, only a few cross-linguistic studies of typological phenomena have included a signed language (inter alia Pfau (2004) on negation). Sign linguists have referred to, and compared the sign language they were studying, to several spoken languages. The morphological process under research is compared to the same process in a spoken language, but in the search for universals, signed languages have not been included. We think that this would be a very interesting, and perhaps revolutionizing linguistic study.

62 References

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