TOWARDS A PROPOSAL FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL VERBS IN BRAZILIAN SIGN LANGUAGE (BSL)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.9771/ell.v0i77.61682Keywords:
Sign Language – Libras; Spatial verbs; Agreement verbs; Directional movement; Spatial syntax.Abstract
This work investigates the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of spatial verbs in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), in comparison with agreement verbs, specifically with regard to the role of directional movement (DIR) in encoding arguments in the syntactic structure of sentences. We consider, with Meir (2002), that: the directional movement identifies thematic roles, while the orientation of the palms identifies the internal dative argument; the opposition between body and space depicts the grammatical category of person (1p versus non-1p) or other locations in space. The corpus consisted of a set of sentences with verbs of movement, elicited according to the semantic classification made by Levin (1993). Data analysis showed that there are morphosyntactic differences regarding the phonological parameters on spatial verbs and agreement verbs, resulting in the following proposal: spatial verbs in Libras are simple agreement verbs, having only one feature [location] to be valued in the syntactic derivation (Lourenço, 2018a,b and following); when used with dative arguments, spatial verbs have a complex structure that combines a simple agreement verb with the dative phrase, introduced through a relational head (Mesquita, 2019); the features [location] and [person]/[number] integrate the bundle of phi-features of the head D0 and correspond, respectively, to the directional movement and the orientation of the palms.
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References
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