Basic argument structure in Russian Sign Language

Abstract

In this paper, basic verb classes and argument structure alternations in Russian Sign Language (RSL) are described, and the implications of these data for the theory of argument structure are discussed. The analysis is based on data elicited using a list of 80 verbal meanings from the Valency Classes in World’s Languages project (Hartmann, Haspelmath & Taylor 2013) and on data collected from the corpus of RSL (Burkova 2015). The study shows that RSL has lexical verbs with different sets of arguments (from zero up to three arguments), and a number of argument structure alternations, such as causative-inchoative, impersonal, reflexive, and reciprocal. It is found that argument structure of lexical verbs and argument structure alternations that apply to them in RSL are typologically common. This implies that the semantic basis of argument structure is independent of modality. In addition, RSL uses classifier predicates whose argument structure is determined by the type of the classifier and by the context. Although such predicates in other sign languages have been used to argue for a syntactic approach to argument structure, RSL classifier predicates do not provide a strong support for this approach.