Collaborative Research: Architecture of Functional Categories in American Sign Language

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This project represents a continuation of research into the syntactic structure of American Sign Language (ASL), funded by NSF grant #SBR-9410562. The research agenda has been to investigate the distribution of functional categories in ASL. Functional categories are those that signal structural relationships among lexical categories. For example, functional categories, such as Tense, Aspect, and Agreement, contain grammatical information that is often expressed morphologically through inflection. Different languages make productive use of different subsets of grammatical categories. It is the characteristics of functional categories that establish basic sentence structure and determine typological variation. The goal has been to uncover the syntactic structure of ASL through examination of functional categories. Research to date has investigated a large number of syntactic constructions in the language, focusing most intensely on Tense and person Agreement projections, as well as the higher level projection relevant to the structure of questions. With respect to these three areas, our results have diverged from previous beliefs about ASL. We have demonstrated the existence of lexical tense markers (contrary to the belief that ASL lacks grammatical tense). Our discovery of non-manual syntactic markings of agreement has provided new insights into the nature of agreement, its representation in the syntax, and its relation to the distribution of null pronouns. Our analysis of questions challenges previous claims about the mechanism of question formation in ASL, as well as claims that have been made about purported constraints on phrase structure and movement processes in language generally. The syntactic research on functional categories will now extend to several additional projections that display interesting interactions with those that we have already studied. For example, Aspect has not only manual instantiations (which have been described in the l iterature) but also interesting non-manual correlates that have not yet been examined. We will also extend our work on agreement to number agreement, both within the clause and the determiner phrase. In addition, we will address several syntactic projections above the level of TP (the clause). Finally, we will complement our studies of the functional structure of ASL with studies of the verb lexicon, focusing on the argument-taking properties of particular classes of verbs.