Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language

Chapter 7

158 Chapter 7 Syntactic Variation: Null Pronoun Variation in ASL Narratives We now turn our attention to one kind of syntactic variation, variable subject pronoun presence, or null subject variation, in plain verbs. ASL verbs are usually considered to fall into three main categories: plain verbs, pointing or indicating verbs, and spatial-locative (or classifier) predicates. In the latter two categories, characteristics of the verb forms provide additional real-world information. The most important characteristics of classifier predicates are a handshape that represents some aspect of the size and shape of an entity and a movement that either adds to the size and shape information provided by the handshape or indicates the movement path of the entity in three-dimensional space. Classifier predicates make extensive use of the signing space in meaningful ways by mapping real-world space onto the signing space, such that a right-to-left movement in the signing space, for example, would be used to describe a right-to-left movement of the referent in the real world. Indicating verbs can provide information about their subject and/or object referent via changes in form. These changes typically involve the location and palm-orientation features of a sign. In example 1, to produce give, a signer’s hand would move from an area of space associated with the subject referent (A), to an area associated with the object referent (B). If B were the giver and A the recipient, that act of giving could be represented by example 2. 1. a giveb book. 2. b givea book. In an actual conversation, the identity of person A and person B and their associations with particular areas of the signing space would have been previously established in the discourse and would be known by both the signer and the addressee. These associations, along with the directional movement of the verb, provide the addressee with the necessary 2714 GUP SVA Chapter 07 6/14/01 9:23 AM Page 158 Syntactic Variation : 159 information to determine the subject’s and object’s respective referents. Similarly, in the verb flatter, the palm orientation indicates the subject and the object: in first person-flatter-third person, the orientation of the signer’s palm is away from the body, whereas in third personflatter -first person, the orientation of the palm is toward the signer’s body. With these verbs, the presence of an overt subject or object pronoun may be considered as providing redundant information. These verbs are sometimes produced with separate signs for subject and object. It appears that this happens for purposes of emphasis or disambiguation and therefore is a function of discourse. Woodward (1973a) explored variation in these indicating verbs (see chapter 1), but we are not discussing variation in this class here. ASL also has a class of so-called plain verbs (Padden 1988) such as think, know, and feel, which do not incorporate indications of subject and object into their structure. Although these verbs necessarily move through space, their use of space is articulatory. Plain verbs would theoretically have to cooccur with separate signs for subject and object. However, it has been observed that these plain verbs do not always cooccur with separate signs for subject and object. Rather, subject presence is variable. Our goal in this chapter is to understand why this might be. Although subjects can be full noun phrases, our focus is on subject pronouns . For example, we examine sentences such as pro.1 think (‘I think’), which also occurs as (pro.1) THINK with no overt pronoun sign. This examination of variation between overt and null pronominal subjects is based on a set of naturally occurring narratives extracted from the videotaped corpus used for the analysis of phonological variation. PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON NULL PRONOUNS Null pronouns have received considerable attention from linguists working in a number of different frameworks and focusing on a variety of areas of linguistics, including formal syntax, first- and second-language acquisition, and variationist sociolinguistics. Here we selectively review recent work in ASL and in sociolinguistic variation. Although much of the work on spoken language null pronouns undertaken within various formal approaches is not without interest, it is not directly relevant to our concern here. Such work deals with questions such as the properties of languages that permit null subjects and those that do not, including 2714 GUP SVA Chapter 07 6/14/01 9:23 AM Page 159 [3.133.109.211] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 21:29...