Collaborative Research: Architecture of Functional Categories in American Sign Language

本项目是对美国手语（ASL）句法结构研究的延续，由美国国家科学基金会资助，资助项目#SBR-9410562。研究的重点是探究美国手语中功能类别的分布。功能范畴是指指示词类之间结构关系的范畴。例如，功能范畴，如时态、方面和协议，包含语法信息，这些信息通常通过词形变化来表达。不同的语言会有效地使用不同的语法范畴子集。功能范畴的特征决定了句子的基本结构，决定了类型的变化。我们的目标是通过检查功能范畴来揭示美国手语的句法结构。迄今为止的研究已经调查了语言中的大量句法结构，其中最集中的是时态和人称一致投射，以及与问题结构相关的高级投射。关于这三个方面，我们的研究结果与之前对美国手语的看法有所不同。我们证明了词汇时态标记的存在（与认为美国手语缺乏语法时态的观点相反）。我们对非手动句法标记的发现提供了新的见解，以了解协议的性质，其在语法中的表示，以及它与空代词分布的关系。我们对问题的分析挑战了以往关于美国手语问题形成机制的说法，以及关于短语结构和语言运动过程一般限制的说法。功能范畴的句法研究现在将扩展到几个额外的投射，这些投射与我们已经研究过的投射显示出有趣的相互作用。例如，Aspect不仅具有手动实例化（已在文献中进行了描述），而且还具有尚未被检查的有趣的非手动关联。我们还将把关于一致性的工作扩展到在从句和限定词短语内的数字一致性。此外，我们将讨论TP（子句）级别以上的几个句法投射。最后，我们将通过动词词汇的研究来补充我们对美国手语功能结构的研究，重点关注特定类别动词的引语特性。

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.