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Noun-Verb Pairs in Taiwan Sign Language

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11173))

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Abstract

Nouns and verbs that are semantically and formationally related are called noun-verb pairs. Noun-verb pairs are found both in spoken and signed languages. A debate has been raised as to whether the noun and the verb in the pairs are distinguished by syntactic environments or they have a morphological (derivational) relation. Based on the Taiwan Sign Language data we have collected, it was found that nouns and verbs are distinguished more systematically by syntactic environments. Modality effects and non-effects in word formation in spoken versus signed languages are also discussed with a special focus on the role of iconicity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The universality of nouns and verbs has been challenged in some languages, e.g., [9,10,11].

  2. 2.

    Following the convention in sign language linguistics, English glosses or equivalents of the lexemes in signed languages are given in capital letters.

  3. 3.

    Before [1], human language was thought to be only possible in the oral-aural modality [32, 33].

  4. 4.

    The use of all the pictures in TSL in this paper has received the approval from the signers.

  5. 5.

    This list of 73 noun-verb pairs was adapted from [25] with reference to [24].

  6. 6.

    To avoid copyright and portrait right issues, some pictures for actions that involve people were hand-drawn by our research assistants.

  7. 7.

    Diminutive affixes such as –zi 子 and –er 兒 to the end of the word is also an identification nouns. The noun form of hùa 畫 in the above example can hence appear as hùa-er 畫兒 and makes the distinction between this noun-verb pair more clearly.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Taiwan Center for Sign Linguistics, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. We thank deaf signers Yu-shan Gu, Jun-ming Yu, and Meng-jun Yu for serving as informants of the TSL data reported in this paper. Research assistants Shih-kai Liu, Yu-shan Yen, and Hsiao-yin Pan helped with data collection. Special thanks go to Prof. James Tai for discussions on various aspects of this study. Comments from the audience of CLSW 2018 and the reviewers are also acknowledged. All the data and analyses are of course my sole responsibility.

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  1. Institute of Linguistics and Taiwan Center for Sign Linguistics, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jane S. Tsay

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  1. Jane S. Tsay
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  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jiun-Shiung Wu

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Tsay, J.S. (2018). Noun-Verb Pairs in Taiwan Sign Language. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_1

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