The use of the copular SELF with adjectives in ASL
Tory Sampson, PhD student, University of California-San Diego
online
Nonverbal predication has not been adequately described in American Sign Language. Contrary to previous claims that there are no copulas in ASL (Bellugi & Fischer 1972, Liddell 1980, Valli et al. 2011, Hill et al. 2018), we have shown that ASL contains an overt copula, termed ‘SELF’, that primarily conveys equative (A is B) and class membership statements (A is a member of set B; Sampson & Mayberry 2022). SELF was categorically preferred to appear with individual-level (IL) predicates that denote inherent and intrinsic properties. On the other hand, stage-level (SL) predicates, which denote properties that are temporally and spatially bounded, were preferred in sentences alongside the pronominal IX, a syntactic analogue of SELF (Sampson & Mayberry in review). We test the differential preference of SELF and IX along the IL/SL semantic distinction by using adjectives, often thought of as intermediaries between nouns and verbs cross-linguistically (Croft 2001, Stassen 1997). Linear mixed effects models support the hypothesis that the copular SELF is indeed preferred with IL adjectives. Further analysis show that the IL/SL semantic distinction is responsible for the different predicational treatments of adjectives with respect to the use of SELF and IX. This distinction suggests a modal nature of the copular SELF in assertion while the pronominal IX appears to convey beliefs or observations. By using adjectives to reveal underlying similarities and differences in syntactic structures, we gain a deeper understanding of ASL nonverbal and adjectival predication.