Linguistics Seminar - Conflict in Sign Language Agreement: the case of backwards verbs

Speaker: Carlo Geraci Institut Jean-Nicod

The agreement system in SL is based on the use of space and the directionality of the movement of the hand during the articulation of the verb. The hand moves from the location of the subjects towards the location of the object marking agreement. In this system there is a class of verbs that seems to be quite exceptional showing the “reverse” pattern (i.e. the verb moves backwards from “object” to subject). In the talk I show data from Italian sign language in which backwards verbs do not involve subject agreement. The real agreement marking is between two internal objects. I then evaluate two currently available accounts: one based on a fine-grained distinction among the available semantic roles (this is a follow up of old works by Jackendoff adapted to sign language by Meir 1998) and one based on ergativity (this is an adaptation of Muller 2009 approach by Pfau and Saltzman). I show that neither account is able to explain the pattern of data and that an analysis in terms of middle constructions is actually better.