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Article published In: Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 26:1 (2023) ► pp.64–116

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Subject agreement in control and modal constructions in Russian Sign Language

Implications for the hierarchy of person features

ORCiD logo with link | University of Amsterdam
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Amsterdam.

Published online: 6 June 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.21005.khr
Abstract
The present research combines three fields of inquiry in sign language linguistics: verbal agreement, person features, and syntactic complexity. These topics have previously been addressed in isolation, but little is known about their interaction. This study attempts to fill this gap by investigating subject agreement in complement clauses in Russian Sign Language. By means of corpus investigation and grammaticality judgments, I found that subject agreement in clausal complements of the control predicates try, love, want, begin, and modal can may be deficient – in particular, it can be reduced to the forms identical to first-person marking even in the case of a third-person subject controller. Deficient subject agreement in complement clauses is thus reminiscent of non-finite verbal forms in spoken languages. I further argue that the choice of first-person forms in deficient agreement reveals a default status of first person in sign languages, which is consistent with proposals regarding the modality-specific properties of first-person reference in these languages.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Person feature system in sign languages
    • 2.2Verbal agreement in sign languages: A modality-independent approach
    • 2.3Subordination in sign languages and beyond
      • 2.3.1Subordination in spoken languages
      • 2.3.2Subordination in sign languages
    • 2.4Complement clauses in Russian Sign Language
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Stimuli
      • I.Baseline incorrect sentences
      • II.Agreement in simple clauses
      • III.Deficient vs. full subject agreement in control complement clauses
      • IV.Deficient vs. full subject agreement in constructions with modal and phasal predicates
      • V.Subject agreement in constructions with first-person embedded object
      • VI.Deficient vs. full subject agreement in impersonal constructions with modals
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Agreement in non-embedded contexts
    • 4.2Subject agreement in control constructions
    • 4.3Subject agreement in constructions with can and begin
    • 4.4Subject agreement in constructions with first-person objects
    • 4.5Subject agreement in impersonal constructions with modals
    • 4.6Interim summary
  • 5.Formal analysis
    • 5.1Hierarchy of the person feature system
    • 5.2Deficient subject agreement in control complement clauses: default first-person feature analysis
    • 5.3Constructions with modal can
      • 5.3.1Subject agreement in constructions with can
      • 5.3.2A note on impersonal constructions with can
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Insights from typology
      • 6.1.1Agreement deficiency in control clauses: Hebrew
      • 6.1.2Finite control and (hyper)raising: Greek and Brazilian Portuguese
    • 6.2Modality-specific properties of the person feature system in sign languages
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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