The Syntax of American Sign Language ― Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure

Recent research on the syntax of signed languages has revealed that, apart from somemodality-specific differences, signed languages are organized according to the same underlyingprinciples as spoken languages. This book addresses the organization and distribution of functionalcategories in American Sign Language (ASL), focusing on tense, agreement, andwh-constructions.Signed languages provide illuminating evidence about functional projections of akind unavailable in the study of spoken languages. Along with manual signing, crucial information isexpressed by specific movements of the face and upper body. The authors argue that such nonmanualmarkings are often direct expressions of abstract syntactic features. The distribution and intensityof these markings provide information about the location of functional heads and the boundaries offunctional projections. The authors show how evidence from ASL is useful for evaluating a number ofrecent theoretical proposals on, among other things, the status of syntactic agreement projectionsand constraints on phrase structure and the directionality of movement.