Where did all the arguments go?: argument-changing properties of classifiers in asl

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of American Sign Language (ASL) classifiers from a syntactic and morphophonological point of view, and addresses issues related to (1) the ways that classifiers can participate in expressing argument structure alternations – in particular, the transitive–intransitive and the unergative-unaccusative alternations in a morpho-syntactic way; and (2) the ways that 'productivity' within classifier systems can be formalized morpho-phonemically. For ASL classifiers, we claim that there are two basic syntactic types those that are associated with the internal argument and those that are associated with an external agentive argument. We claim that classifiers project syntactically as (functional) heads and that they determine the status (as external or internal) of the argument that lands in their Spec. We identify a discrete agentive morpheme in ASL classifier constructions, on phonological and syntactic grounds, a morpheme which is responsible for the agentive readings in two types of classifiers. The phonological representation needed to express this morpheme expands the range of possibilities of templates used in prosodic morphology. This paper contributes to general linguistic theory in providing support for a (morpho-)syntactic analysis of argument structure alternations and in demonstrating how morphological templates can be used to account for the relation between morphological and phonological form in ASL classifiers.