Semantic Perspicuity and the Locative Hypothesis: Implications for Acquisition

Abstract

The structure of the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL) has important implications for the theory of universal grammar and the logical problem of language acquisition. A detailed study of the morphology of ASL verbs is presented, showing how all the verbs in the language are built, by rule, from six basic locative/directional verb stems. The ASL verbal system supports the “locative hypothesis,” the view that all or most grammatical and semantic structures in language ultimately derive from spatial notions, and is shown to be “semantically perspicuous,” that is, the morphological structure of ASL mediates a virtual one-to-one map (isomorphism) between its phonetic structure and its semantic structure. This perspicuity gives us a “window” onto semantics, rendering ASL an invaluable resource for the study of lexical (word) semantics. It is argued that each subsystem of ASL grammar represents something approaching “core grammar,” that is, a basic or unmarked structure, and one possibly approximating the structures acquired initially by children acquiring any language, though often obscured in other languages by the accretion of marked structures. The basic verbal system of ASL is compared to characterizations of the initial semantic system of the child crosslinguistically.