Iconicity as a mediator between verb semantics and morphosyntactic structure
A corpus-based study on verbs in German Sign Language
Dissertation by Marloes Oomen
In many sign languages around the world, some verbs can
express grammatical agreement with not just one but two arguments, while
other verbs do not express agreement at all. Moreover, and rather
curiously, there is a remarkable degree of semantic overlap across sign
languages between verbs that possess agreement properties. It has been
suggested that iconicity has some part to play in this: in sign
languages, there is the potential for aspects of verb meaning to be
iconically represented in a verb’s form.
In this dissertation, I investigate how semantics and morphosyntactic
structure interact in constructions containing verbs with varying
agreement properties in German Sign Language (DGS),
using naturalistic dialogues between signers from the DGS Corpus as the
primary data source.
I show that certain semantic properties – also known to govern
transitivity marking in spoken languages – are predictive of verb type
in DGS, where indeed systematic iconic mappings play a
mediating role. The results enable the formulation of cross-linguistic
predictions about the interplay between verb semantics and verb type in
sign languages.
A subsequent analysis of a range of morphosyntactic properties of
different verb types leads up to the conclusion that even ‘plain’ verbs,
in fact, grammatically agree with their arguments. This in turn
motivates a unified syntactic analysis in terms of
agreement of constructions with verbs that do and do not overtly express
it, thus presenting a novel solution to the typological puzzle that
supposedly only verbs of a (partially) semantically definable subset
agree in DGS and other sign languages.
Download the dissertation
here.