English Transcript for “A Signer’s Perspective”
Hi! I am here to discuss this paper. It was published in 2011 in a journal that specializes in theoretical linguistics. The authors are LilloMartin and Meier. The title of the paper is: On the Linguistic Status of 'Agreement' in Sign Languages. I will divide my discussion into two parts, the
first on what is covered in the paper and the other on my perspective as a signer. The authors of the paper wanted to inform you that there are two
groups of linguists who are debating the notion of agreement, a linguistic term as applied to American Sign Language (ASL). With one group, the
use of the linguistic term for ASL is thought to be inappropriate and erroneous. The other group thought differently. That is, the use of agreement is
correct concerning signed languages. The authors are part of the latter group and were advocating the linguistic view of ASL.
Now you may be thinking about what is really involved with agreement as a linguistic term. To be exact, verbs in ASL can undergo agreement
(at least for some linguists). One good example would be the sign 'give'. The basic form is this way (a demonstration shown in ASL), and its form
can be modified to account for person marking (again, a demonstration is made with the verb's form undergoing spatial modifications). The question
is then: Why some linguists do not see that as linguistic? This is where the paper comes into the picture. The authors tried to make the argument that
the spatial modifications to the verb (as frequently found in ASL) are linguistic in nature. What can be seen at this point is that the linguists are
divided and are debating over the linguistic status of verbs undergoing spatial modifications.
It is important to discuss this matter more by looking at our history. Let us go back to the 1920s when linguists considered signing among deaf
people, but concluded that the signing lacked linguistic features. The signing behavior was described as gestural. The signers were thought to create
'pictures' as they communicated. Individuals who could hear were considered to be speaking in sentences and with a grammatical structure in use.
With these considerations, signers and their behavior were perceived as unanalyzable in linguistic terms. ASL was subject to exclusion from the
family of human languages.
During the 1960s, the authors of the paper described H ]