The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure (review)

This book provides broad theoretical coverage of the syntax of American Sign Language (ASL), the visual-gestural language of the Deaf community in the United States and much of Canada. In developing their detailed analyses of ASL clause structure, tense and agreement, determiners, wh-questions, and related structures, the authors adopt certain assumptions of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1995), especially feature checking. Accordingly, the book’s orientation and argumentation will not be very accessible to anyone who does not have familiarity with recent developments in linguistic theory. For readers who have little familiarity with sign languages and sign language research, the book provides orienting information concerning the sociolinguistic context in which ASL is used and a discussion of methodological considerations for eliciting and analyzing sign language data.

For further orientation, the authors devote a chapter to ‘Language in the visual modality’, in which they overview the nature of sign languages with respect to the production of signs, the simultaneous articulation of manual (signed) and nonmanual (head and upper body) expression, and the spatial representation of linguistic information. The chapter outlines how ASL utilizes space to represent φ-features and to articulate pronominals, reflexives, determiners, and verb agreement. Discussion of the articulation of signs and agreement marking is supported by pairs of black and white photos that capture the beginning and the end of a sign sequence. Unfortunately, this glimpse of the sign sequence and the low quality of these and other photos throughout the book may not provide much assistance to readers who have little familiarity with sign language. The authors do include a useful appendix of notational conventions that summarizes all the glosses, indices, diacritics, and nonmanual markings they use for representing ASL sign sequences.

Fundamental to the analyses of tense, agreement, and wh-constructions in ASL is the role of nonmanual expressions (e.g. headshakes, head tilts, eyebrow raising, eyebrow lowering, eye gaze, etc.). The authors maintain that these nonmanual expressions are manifestations of abstract features like +neg, +wh, and φ-features and that their overt expression in ASL provides concrete evidence for the existence of such features. An example of nonmanual agreement marking in ASL is illustrated in 1.¹

1. 1.

The authors maintain that the sign sequence JOHN LOVE MARY is accompanied by a head tilt toward the subject JOHN_i and an eye gaze toward MARY_j. Coindexing indicates the direction of the head tilt (toward the space where JOHN is signed) and the direction of the eye gaze (toward the space where MARY is signed). The horizontal lines indicate the duration of the nonmanual expressions. It is argued that the head tilt toward JOHN and the eye gaze toward MARY are concrete manifestations of the subject agreement and object agreement features associated with Agr_s and Agr_o, respectively. Most of the proposals for ASL depend crucially on the role of nonmanual syntactic markings and the feature checking c-command domains that they delineate across signed utterances. The authors maintain that ‘the distribution, spread, intensity, and perseveration of such markings provide evidence about the location of abstract syntactic features’ (47).

The most provocative and controversial claim is that ASL exhibits rightward wh-movement, a claim that runs counter to proposals, as in Kayne 1994, that wh-movement is universally leftward. The authors’ rightward wh-movement analysis also poses a direct challenge to the leftward movement analyses that have been proposed for ASL, most notably by Lillo-Martin 1990, Lillo-Martin and Fischer 1992, Petronio 1993, and Petronio and Lillo-Martin 1997. The strident tone of the book bespeaks the intensity of the leftward/rightward debate and, in developing their rightward analysis, the authors sustain a dogged attack on the proposals of these other authors. The debate is driven by opposing views not only on the relevant syntactic processes needed to account for the distribution of wh-phrases...