The Architecture of Functional Categories in American Sign Language

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Neidle Although some research on American Sign Language (ASL) syntax has been done, the field still lacks consensus on even the most basic questions regarding ASL phrase structure. Many theoretical controversies may, in fact, be a consequence of inadequate means for written transcription and reporting of visual-gestural data. This has precluded both the replicability of results and accessibility of the raw data for direct inspection by the scientific community. The representation of ASL signs using English-like glosses has obliterated-and implicitly undervalued-extremely important manual and non-manual information expressed through signing. Glosses are inconsistent and frequently ambiguous or misleading. Reliance on glosses may well have given rise to incompatible and contradictory theoretical claims found in the literature. We will develop a prototype of a linguistically oriented computerized multimedia database of ASL that allows simultaneous access to raw video data and to representations of that data in linguistically useful formats. It is our hope that our prototype will lead to subsequent funding for the development of a large-scale sign database, accessible through a server, via the Internet, to the ASL research community. We come to this task with a very specific research agenda: to test and refine the hierarchical representation of functional categories in ASL that has emerged from our recent studies focusing on Agreement; grammatical relations; and Tense and Aspect. We have achieved sufficient understanding of the syntactic organization of ASL to lay out the major components of its phrase structure, and to identify what is needed to complete the picture. To answer those outstanding questions, we will investigate several constructions in detail: the tag construction, rhetorical questions, and relative clauses. We intend to use standard methods of linguistic elicitation and argumentation, supported by multimedia documentation of our da ta. While the two parts of the project are different in nature, we believe that significant progress in the understanding of ASL syntax can only be achieved by syntactic analyses based on the kind of rigorous attention to data that current technologies now make possible.