Psychological verb constructions in American sign language
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss Psychological Verb constructions in American Sign Language (ASL). In particular, I will detail the ASL constructions associated with both uncaused psychological (psych) events and caused psych events. Uncaused psych events in ASL are expressed using transitive psych verbs, such as love, enjoy, pity. In these sentences, the grammatical subject of the sentence is the experiencer (Experiencer Subject- ES) of the emotion, and the grammatical object is the target of that emotion. Importantly, the grammatical object is not assumed to have a role in causing the psych event. ASL research has widely assumed that ASL does not allow psych verb constructions in which the grammatical object of the sentence is the thematic experiencer (Experiencer Object- EO) of the psych event (Kegl, 1990 & Meir et al, 2007). This research supports that conclusion, and develops it further by attempting to discover how ASL does encode for caused psych events. The result is that caused psych events in ASL appear to be expressed using intransitive psych verbs, such as embarrass, surprise, inspire. This analysis suggests that the ASL expression of these caused psych events is biclausal, and that the causer may in fact best be labeled as a causing event. Expanding on Ramchand's Event Structure Analysis, I introduce a proposed new structure to account for a commonly attested word order in intransitive caused psych events in ASL. Further, in order to fully describe the structure of the intransitive psych verbs, I also suggest the presence of light verbs in ASL. Specific to this paper, I focus on the potential ASL light verb LOOK-AT. This light verb occurs frequently in the unmarked sentence structures expressing caused psych events, and appears to play a key role in linking of the causing event and the caused psych event. The experimental method I used is an online survey with embedded videos. I also cite examples from a pilot study in which a Deaf informant frequently produced this caused psych event structure when presented with a translation task involving English EO sentences
Degree
M.A.
Advisors
Wilbur, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Cognitive psychology
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