Affect Verbs in American Sign Language
Presentation language: English
Affect verbs reference circumstances in which an experiencer undergoes an internal change
in response to a stimulus. While affective experiences are universal, the constructions available
to describe them differ in each language. As affect verbs in sign languages have not been
studied, this project is a first step in that direction, examining American Sign Language (ASL).
Talmy (2003) notes the majority of English affect verbs are stimulus-subject, though they
may appear in constructions which evoke different construals. For example, to describe a
situation in which Mary reads a book and experiences fascination, a speaker could say any of the
sentences in (1)-(3). These refer to the same situation but evoke different construals with respect
to the prominence given to each participant. The primary focal participant of the unmarked verb
fascinate is the stimulus, so book appears in subject position in (1). The secondary focal
participant, the experiencer is lexicalized in the object position. In (2) the suffix -ing combines
with fascinate, creating an adjectival construction with a stimulus subject. The experiencer is
left unspecified, implying that anyone who reads the book will experience fascination. Finally,
the construction in (3) evokes a construal with the experiencer as the primary focal participant.
In English, the majority of affect verbs are stimulus-subject, like fascinate, while in other spoken
languages most affect verbs are experiencer-subject (Talmy, 2003). Previous research has not
studied affect verbs in the visual modality. This project is the first to investigate the
constructions and construals describing affective events in a sign language.
The data for this project were elicited through a translation task: ten English stimulussubject affect verbs appeared in each of the three constructions represented in (1)-(3). Five native
ASL signers translated each sentence, and the videotaped data were coded for: clause types,
primary and secondary focal participant roles, use of space, and non-manual markers
(movements of the head, torso, eyes, brows, cheeks, nose, and mouth).
The results indicate that ASL predominately construes the experiencer as the primary focal
participant, in contrast to English. Even though the elicitation prompts were evenly distributed
across three construal types, the vast majority of elicited ASL utterances encoded construals in
which the experiencer had primary prominence, as in (4). Constructions encoding the stimulus
as the subject showed evidence of English influence, such as prepositions borrowed from Signed
English (5). Of the 120 responses, only 9 construals left the experiencer unspecified, and
participants commented that translating sentences with an unspecified experiencer was especially
challenging.
In these data, signers employed modality-specific features, such as depiction and surrogate
blends, to describe affective events. Use of space to modify verb agreement was used minimally
to evoke construals in which the experiencer was not the primary focal participant. Future
research on signed languages will determine if the visual modality predetermines the
predominate construal or if this preference for experiencer-subject affect verbs in ASL is a
language-specific phenomenon.
Word Count: 498
Examples
1) That book fascinated Mary.
(stimulus subject, experiencer object)
2) That book is fascinating.
(stimulus subject, unspecified experiencer)
3) Mary was fascinated with that book.
(experiencer subject, stimulus oblique)
____________t
4) WHITE BEAR CHILDREN FASCINATE
In regards to the white bears, the children were fascinated.
(experiencer subject, stimulus in topic phrase)
5) MATH CONFUSE TO MANY STUDENT
Math is confusing to many students.
(stimulus subject, experiencer oblique)
(Signed English TO indicates language interference)
ASL Construals of Affective Events
Figure 1. Data indicate strong preference in ASL for
construals with the experiencer as primary focal participant
Reference
Talmy, Leonard. 2003. Toward a cognitive semantics: Typology and process in concept
structuring (Language, speech, and communication) Volume 2. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology: Cambridge, MA.