Body as subject

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of linguistics Vol. 43; no. 3; pp. 531 - 563
Main Authors MEIR, IRIT, PADDEN, CAROL A., ARONOFF, MARK, SANDLER, WENDY
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.11.2007
Subjects
Agreement
American sign language
Body
Body/Body Parts
Complements
Descriptive studies and applied theories
Discourse analysis
Gestures
Hands
Inflection
International sign language
Language
Linguistic agreement
Linguistic research
Linguistics
Morphology
Object
Predicates
Semantics
Sign Language
Sign languages
Subject
Syntactics
Syntax
Thematic studies
Verbs
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Summary:The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sub-lexical structure of iconic signs denoting states of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form-meaning correspondence : the signer's body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event-including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typological puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement generally ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology.
Bibliography:We thank Malka Rappaport-Hovav for very helpful discussion, and Yehuda Falk and two anonymous JL referees for thoughtful comments. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 9th Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Conference, Florianopolis, Brazil, and at the workshop on Syntax, Lexicon and Event Structure, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Figures 8 and 10 are extracted from data elicited with materials generously made available to us by the Language and Cognition group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingusitics. Figures 3–7, 9 and 11 are copyright of the Sign Language Research Laboratory, University of Haifa. Our research was supported by United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation grant 2000-372; Israel Science Foundation Grant no. 553/04; and National Institutes of Health grant DC6473.
ArticleID:00476
PII:S0022226707004768
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ISSN:0022-2267
1469-7742
DOI:10.1017/S0022226707004768