Collaborative Research: Architecture of Functional Categories in American Sign Language

该项目是美国手语句法结构研究的继续，由美国国家科学基金会资助#sbr-9410562。研究议程一直是调查功能范畴在ASL中的分布。功能范畴是表示词汇范畴之间结构关系的范畴。例如，功能范畴，如时态、体和协议，包含的语法信息通常通过词形变化来表达。不同的语言对语法范畴的不同子集进行了有效的使用。正是功能范畴的特点决定了基本的句子结构，并决定了类型变异。我们的目标是通过对功能范畴的考察来揭示ASL的句法结构。到目前为止，研究已经对语言中的大量句法结构进行了研究，主要集中在时态和人称协议投射，以及与疑问句结构相关的更高层次的投射。关于这三个领域，我们的结果与之前对ASL的看法有所不同。我们已经证明了词汇时态标记的存在(与认为美国手语没有语法时态的看法相反)。我们对非人工一致句法标记的发现为理解一致的本质、它在句法中的表现以及它与空代词分布的关系提供了新的见解。我们对疑问句的分析挑战了先前关于美国第二语言中疑问句形成机制的主张，以及关于短语结构和语言运动过程普遍受到限制的主张。关于功能范畴的句法研究现在将扩展到几个额外的投射，这些投射显示了与我们已经研究过的有趣的互动。例如，方面不仅具有手动实例化(已在L的迭代中描述)，还具有尚未研究的有趣的非手动关联。我们还将把我们关于协议的工作扩展到数字协议，包括在条款和限定词短语中。此外，我们还将讨论主句(从句)层面上的几个句法投影。最后，我们将通过对动词词典的研究来补充我们对ASL功能结构的研究，重点是特定类别动词的论元接受特性。

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.