Bare Noun Phrases, Verbs and Quantification in ASL

Abstract

Verbs in American Sign Language (ASL) are divided into three classes: plain verbs, agreement verbs, and spatial verbs (Padden, 1988, 1990). These three classes differ in their internal morphology, the type of affixes they can appear with, and the various word orders they permit. Verbs from all three classes can occur with both quantified noun phrases and bare noun phrases. In this paper, I look at the interaction of the three types of verbs with bare noun phrases; that is, those noun phrases (NPs) that are unmarked for singular or plural. As shown in (1–3), the quantificational value of a bare NP can differ depending on the type of verb it occurs with. Sentence (1) contains an uninflected plain verb, (2) contains an inflected agreement verb, and (3) contains a spatial verb with a singular classifier morpheme ‘/1/’ which corresponds to a singular person.1