Date of Award

Spring 2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Languages and Cultures

First Advisor

Ronnie Wilbur

Committee Member 1

Elaine Francis

Committee Member 2

Elena Benedicto

Abstract

The relationship between the duration and telicity of the causing predicate and the gradability and standard of comparison of the resultant predicate in resultative constructions in American Sign Language (ASL) is investigated. Two homomorphic accounts of resultative constructions are considered, the feature-based approach of Beavers (2008), and the compositional approach of Ramchand (2008). The analysis utilizes morpho-phonological and semantics interface properties in ASL in order to discriminate between the two approaches. These properties are expressed by the Visibility Hypothesis (VH) in Wilbur, Malaia, and Shay (2012), which posits that the ends of semantic scales are phonologically marked in ASL in particular, but also in sign languages more generally. It is concluded that the compositional approach of Ramchand (2008) better accounts for the data.

Download

Included in

Linguistics Commons

Share

COinS