The morphology of first-person object forms of directional verbs in ASL

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about whether there exists a grammatical distinction between first-person and non-first person in signed languages, namely American Sign Language (ASL). The debate has been based largely on different analyses of pointing signs but minimally on the person-marking of directional verbs for object. We present an analysis of 95 unique first-person object forms of directional verbs from a combination of elicited and naturalistic data. We test the hypothesis that there is a default first-person object location at the center of the chest. Although we report evidence consistent with that hypothesis, we also find that some first-person verb forms are irregular with respect to the following dimensions of morphological properties in which they are lexically specified for: (1) final place of articulation; (2) height; (3) facing; and (4) body contact. Furthermore, a handful of directional verbs do not have first-person object forms. We interpret the findings to constitute evidence for the distinction between first-person and non-first person in ASL.