DEAF 484 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Handshape
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Verbs, Aspect, Space, and Sentence Types
- Verbs in ASL
o Verb – the action or state of being in a sentence
o Plain Verbs
▪ Verbs produced in a static location and cannot be altered without changing
the meaning of the sign (ex: dance, love, eat, forget, run, remember,
thinking, etc.)
▪ The locations of these verbs carry no specific meaning
▪ No subject or object information
o Indicating Verbs
▪ Verbs produced in a dynamic way (ex: NO-TO-OTHER, NO-TO-SELF,
GIVE, PICK-ON, UNDERSTAND-EACH-OTHER, LOOK-AT-EACH-
OTHER, #HURT-ARM, SURGERY-ARM)
▪ Location can be altered to change the meaning of the sign
▪ The locations of these verbs carry meaning
▪ Often includes subject or object information
o Depicting Verbs
▪ Verbs that show action or state of being (like all verbs)
▪ Can describe appearance, motion, and can vary in scope
▪ Used to be called “classifiers”
- Time and Tense
o Because languages have displacement they can talk about events that happen in the
past, present, and future
o Languages do this by using time and tense
o 4 Categories
▪ Lexical Items
• ASL has specific words that can be used to express time and tense
• Examples
o Tomorrow
o Past
o Now
o Future
▪ Space
• Since ASL is produced in 3D space, time can be expressed taking
advantage of this format
• Examples
o Top → Bottom
o Left → Right
o Front → Back
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