Unification, competition and optimality in signed languages: aspects of the syntax of American Sign Language (ASL)
نویسندگان
چکیده
Major advances have been made in recent years with respect to our understanding of the syntactic organization of signed languages. However, most of the syntactic research has been carried out within derivational syntactic frameworks. Certain issues have been left unaddressed because such frameworks do not readily lend themselves to explanatory solutions. This paper will begin with a brief introduction to the syntactic organization of American Sign Language (ASL); then one specific area where unification-based optimalitytheoretic approaches might offer insights will be discussed: the manual and non-manual expressions of syntactic information. This represents research in progress, and suggestions from the conference participants would be welcome.
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