Disjunction in Space: Linearity-Based Verb Agreement in Signed Languages

This set of activities will yield new benefits in the areas of research, student training, and community outreach, through the lens of signed language linguistics in an exciting topic of current interest: the use of space as an abstract linguistic variable.

The project’s primary goal is to explore the extent to which spatial morphology in sign language is affected by hierarchical and linear constraints imposed by the syntactic architecture of human language. Previous experimental work has shown that linear constraints exist in gender agreement in spoken languages in the domain of coordinated noun phrases (conjunction), but have not yet looked in detail at comparing these phenomena with disjunction, in particular as it arises in signed languages.

Proving that feature sharing is subject to both hierarchical and linear constraints also in Sign Language will provide unique evidence that the morphosyntactic mechanisms of sentence generation are modality independent and support the existence of a shared underlying architecture of human language.

Area

Linguistics

UCL leads

• Professor Andrew Nevins, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences