The Licensing of Null Arguments in American Sign Language

The distribution of null arguments across languages has been accounted for in terms of two distinct strategies: licensing by agreement and licensing by topic. Lillo-Martin (1986, 1991) claims that American Sign Language (ASL) exploits both strategies for licensing null arguments, depending on the mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistic inquiry 2000, Vol.31 (1), p.1-27
Main Authors: Bahan, Benjamin, Kegl, Judy, Lee, Robert G., MacLaughlin, Dawn, Neidle, Carol
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
agreement
American sign language
f-features
Grammatical clauses
Language
licensing of null arguments
Linguistic agreement
Linguistics
non-manual markings
Psycholinguistics
Psychology of language
Sentences
Sign language
Syntactics
Syntax
Verbs
Visual fixation
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Summary:The distribution of null arguments across languages has been accounted for in terms of two distinct strategies: licensing by agreement and licensing by topic. Lillo-Martin (1986, 1991) claims that American Sign Language (ASL) exploits both strategies for licensing null arguments, depending on the morphological characteristics of the verb. Here we show that this is incorrect. Once the nonmanual correlates of agreement features (comparable to the nonmanual expressions of other syntactic features) in ASL are recognized, it becomes apparent that null arguments in this language are systematically licensed by an expression of syntactic agreement.
ISSN:0024-3892
1530-9150
DOI:10.1162/002438900554271