engleski

Agreement marking in Croatian Sign Language –a new view on the old agreement

Verb agreement in sign languages (SLs) has posed an analyticalpuzzle for decades. It would appear that, unlike spoken language agreement, SLverb agreement is cross-linguistically odd in at least 2 ways: (1) only a subset of verbs show agreement, leading to much speculation on its triggers ; and (2) object agreement is more common, with subject agreement only visible when object agreement is marked, thus subject-only agreement seemsabsent. Despite a long history of approaches (Pfau et al 2018 for overview), the fundamental problem remained that analysts attempted to explain only what was most visibly marked, namely change in hand orientation and direction of verb stem movement (Mathur & Rathmann 2012). This focus led to ignoring all verbs withoutpath movement, because without it, there cannot be change in direction. That is, only transitive verbs were being analyzed, and worse, only those withobvious path movement.Thus, the first oddity of SLagreement is readily explained by the fact that most of the verbs were labeled ‘plain/non-agreeing, ’ excluded from further analysis.The second oddity results from the first: intransitive verbs, with only a subject, donot have path movement and were therefore also excluded. Lourenço(2018 ; Lourenço& Wilbur 2018) addressed thisdifferently: what factors block agreement marking? He made 2observations about Brazilian Sign Language (Libras)verbs: (1) truly ‘plain’ verbs were body-anchored, hence blocked from changing location to show agreement ; and (2) all remaining verbs showed matchingof location of verb production and its argument, called co-localization. From this perspective, agreement is not restricted to just a subset of verbs butmore pervasive than previously recognized. Consider first transitive verbs with 2arguments: traditional path analysis starts at location of the subject and ends at location of the object, which requires a path. Prior analyses incorrectly inferred that pathcarried agreement marking, rather than the argument locations, even when locationsare treatedseparately, to be copied onto the verb (Pfau et al, 2018).Applying this to intransitive verbs, theycan be co-localized with their arguments ; with only1argument, no path occurs ; agreement that intransitive verbs display was not recognized.Here, weapply thisagreement analysis to Croatian Sign Language (HZJ).In Figure 1, the verb KISS is atransitive‘agreeing’verb. Using the older description of SL agreement marking, we would say ‘there is [direction] movement from subject location to locus ofthe object.’From current perspective, it is clear that the verb KISS starts at location of subject GIRL and ends at location of object BOY ; we note that BOY istopicalized to front of the sentence, but this does not affect its localization in space which is shownwith use of a person classifier (‘cl’). Figure 2 shows2verbs, COME and HOLD-PISTOL, which are not signed in “neutral” space, but areproducedatthe locusofthe subject. The 3rdimage shows where COME ends, indicating thediscourse localization of the subject. The 4thimage shows HOLD-PISTOL co-localized in the same location, indicating who isholding the pistol. Both verbs show subject agreement ; COME might or might not have been included in prior analysis for itsendpoint as object if a discourse referent were located there, but neither verb would have been considered assubject agreement, and HOLD-PISTOL, withno internal movement, would have been excluded completely from further consideration. Instead, we see that itmatches subject locationthroughco-localization. Thismatching of location is the morphological realizationof SL agreement. It is not the directionof movement that marks agreement, but thematching of location of beginning (subject) and end point (object) of the verb to locationof its arguments. The pathmovement in so-called agreeing verbs is related to predicate event properties, as argued by Wilbur (2008, 2010).When a "body-anchored" verb is unable to show agreement by co-localization, we assume that this is comparable to spoken situations in which markers are phonologically lost in particular environments (so-called zero allomorph). This paper shows an application to another SL, HZJ, and we hope will changehow people view agreement in SLs.From this perspective, SLs can no longer be given as examples of violations of verb agreement norms.

verb agreement ; co-localization ; sign language

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