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Article published In:
Special Issue in Memory of Irit Meir
Edited by Diane Lillo-Martin, Wendy Sandler, Marie Coppola and Rose Stamp
[Sign Language & Linguistics 23:1/2] 2020
► pp. 17–37

Person vs. locative agreement

Evidence from late learners and language emergence

| University of Connecticut
| University of Connecticut
| University of Connecticut

Sign languages are frequently described as having three verb classes. One, ‘agreeing’ verbs, indicates the person/number of its subject and object by modification of the beginning and ending locations of the verb. The second, ‘spatial’ verbs, makes a similar appearing modification of verb movement to represent the source and goal locations of the theme of a verb of motion. The third class, ‘plain’ verbs, is characterized as having neither of these types of modulations. A number of researchers have proposed accounts that collapse all of these types, or the person-agreeing and spatial verbs. Here we present evidence from late learners of American Sign Language and from the emergence of new sign languages that person agreement and locative agreement have a different status in these conditions, and we claim their analysis should be kept distinct, at least in certain ways.

Keywords: verb agreement, language development, delayed first language, language emergence, sign languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Verb classes in sign languages
  • 2.Late learners
  • 3.Language emergence
    • 3.1Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL)
    • 3.2Israeli Sign Language (ISL)
    • 3.3Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL)
  • 4.Implications
    • 4.1Why locative before person agreement?
    • 4.2Grammaticalization path
    • 4.3Implications for current theories of verb agreement
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00042.kwo
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