Agreement Phenomena in Korean Sign Language

Ki-hyun Nam; Yeonwoo Kim; Junmo Cho

doi:10.19033/sks.2019.9.65.75

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the syntactic distribution and constraints of argument-verb covariance in person, number and gender features of Korean Sign Language (KSL) and to discuss KSL’s distinctive grammatical characteristics in the area of agreement. The result of the acceptability study on the syntactic distribution and constraints leads us to regard that person features expressed through locus as well as number/gender features expressed through hand shapes equally participate in a same syntactic operation. In particular, KSL offers several notable characteristics in agreement phenomena. First, in KSL person, number and gender features all participate in agreement, as number and gender features display the same argument-verb covariance as person features do. Second, in KSL a viable approach to the syntactic operation of agreement is suggested to be feature checking rather than feature sharing or copying as unmarked-marked/marked-unmakred argument-verb relationship is allowed. Third, KSL shows a utilization of an existing grammatical feature for a pragmatic feature, as in the case of multiple spoken languages (Wiltscho 2019). The locus morpheme bearing the first person feature (‘s’) is proposed to have its person feature ‘recycled’ to a logophoric feature. It is hoped that these characteristics found in KSL be of value for the future sign language agreement research.

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REFERENCES (29)
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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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