Reconsidering Number Agreement in Hong Kong Sign Language
Wai-sze Scholastica LAM
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL), like other signed languages (i.e. American Sign
Language (ASL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), etc.)
demonstrates overt agreement morphology. Verb agreement (i.e. person and number)
and aspect are generally assumed to be associated with verbs in signed languages
(Fischer and Gough 1978, Klima and Bellugi 1979, Padden 1983, 1988, Bahan 1996,
Cormier 2002, among others). Some studies question the verb agreement analysis and
suggest that some of the number agreement markers (e.g. exhaustive) demonstrate
quantification (Wilbur 1987, Petronio 1995). The goal of this paper is two-fold. First,
we propose that verbal marking previously analyzed as number agreement indeed
reflects universal quantification in HKSL. Second, we suggest that scope accounts for
the ambiguity involved in the quantificational structure.
The present study argues that the traditional number agreement analysis is not
applicable in HKSL. We base largely on comparison between the properties of the two
notions, number agreement and quantification. First, number agreement simply
indicates the relation between the verbs and their arguments in terms of number. When a
verb is marked with number values of the arguments, the lexical meaning of the verbs
will not change. But in the case of quantification, quantifiers or quantifying markers
always encode additional meaning to the verbs. In the case of HKSL, the verbal
marking previously analyzed as number agreement involves additional meaning and
therefore we suggest that they are indeed quantifying markers. Take exhaustive marking
as an example. When this verbal marking is attached to the verb as in (1), distributivity
is involved:
(1) Context: The teacher said she forgot delivering students’ homework and students
are gone. The monitor told the teachers that:
RH INDEXpro 1
RESPONSIBLE-FOR GIVEmu
LH
BH
‘I will be responsible for giving (the homework to each student).’
The verb sign GIVE is repeated for three times with displacement and a distributive
reading is obtained in this example: INDEXpro 1 ‘I’ will distribute one piece of
homework to each student in the class. If exhaustive is purely number agreement marker,
no such distributive reading would be obtained. Additionally, distributivity is one kind
of properties of quantification (Gil 1995, Bach, Jelinek, Kratzer and Partee 1995,
Moltmann 1997). We therefore argue that the morphological marking in (1) indeed
marks quantification, specifically, distributive universal quantification.
Another argument supporting our claim is from ambiguity. Ambiguity is always
observed with the quantifiers. For instance, an English sentence Someone loves
everyone can be interpreted in two ways: (i) everyone loves someone and (ii) someone
loves everyone (Aoun and Li 1989). In contrast, we do not observe any ambiguity
arisen from number agreement. As a result, ambiguity serves as a way to distinguish
number agreement marker from quantifying marker. In the case of HKSL, the verbal
marking previously identified as multiple marking involves ambiguity. Consider
example (2):
(2) Context: A couple came back after traveling. Many friends came to their home.
RH TWO-OF-THEM
GIVEmu
LOOK
LH
GIVEmu
BH
PHOTO-BOOK
FRIEND
‘Two of them give photo albums to friends to look at.’
Deaf signers obtain three readings from this example: (i) The couple gives a photo
album to each friend to look at, (ii) The couple give different photo albums to different
groups of friends to look at and (iii) The couple give two or three photo albums to some
groups of friends to look at. As noted, ambiguity associates with quantifier but not with
number agreement marker. We therefore suggest that the morphological marking of the
verb is not number agreement marker. Instead, we argue that it is a verbal quantifying
marker encoding the meaning of every which is lexical quantifier having several
interpretations as well. This further supports our claim here.
The second goal of this paper is to account for quantificational structure in HKSL. To
start with, we base largely on constructions where verbal quantifying markers discussed
above. Take the marker in (2) as an example. When the morphological marking is
analyzed as verbal quantifying marker every, we can go further and ask how we can
account for the various interpretations involved in example (2). The ways of scope
taking will answer this question. In (i), the quantifying marker every takes scope over
the event and therefore a distributive reading which is the same as that in (1) is obtained.
It is also possible that the verbal quantifying marker every takes scope over either the
indirect object FRIEND as in (ii) or direct object PHOTO-BOOK as in (iii). We can
explain the second and third reading with May’s (1977) proposal of quantifier raising
(QR). But for (i), can we capture the interpretation with QR as well? If yes, how does
the QR function for the first interpretation? This paper will answer all these questions.
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