Raising a Hand: Examining Verb/Aspect Movement in ASL

Abstract

This thesis discusses the questions “Does aspect make different word orders available, compared to the basic unmarked order, for ASL signers?” and “Where is Aspect syntactically located?”, questions primarily discussed by three previous authors: Matsuoka (1997), Braze (2004), and Laszakovits et al (2022). This thesis seeks to adjudicate between the three competing theories and their proposed word orders by eliciting acceptability judgements on sentences with and without aspect.

The results of this elicitation are threefold. SVO is the highest accepted word order in general and as an average across all participants for each aspect. Aspect inflection does not ‘unlock’ word orders. Instead, participants either accepted all word orders regardless of aspect, or they accepted only SVO word order, which creates two groups: Flexible group and Rigid group. Based on these results, I proposed a syntactic theory of ASL based on Matsuoka (1997)’s theory, with some updates and modifications. This proposal is centered around verb and aspect movement, which is similar to proposals made for spoken languages. This thesis thus builds on the research done to prove that the differences between spoken and sign languages are a matter of modality.