4

1,14 Spaw typm and tmb types in HSJ,

purents’ housu, and cerlainly not necessarily to be found ut thc rlght, eentre, and Icft of thc housc.

After cach sentence she gave a ‘probe sign’ and asked thc yuhinlecrs in her experiment if that probe was in the sentence. The volunteers had to decide quickly. For example, she might give the probe OIL or HAIRBRUSH, and thcy would be expected to respond ‘no’, because these were not in the previ-ous sentence. If she gave the probe GAS or PERFUME, they would be expected to respond ‘yes’, because these were in the previous sentence.

The ‘correct’ probe was sometimes given at the correct location and some-times not. For example, GAS_L (which is the wrong location) or GAS_R (the correct location); PERFUME_L (correct location) or PERFUME_r (wrong location). In both cases they were slower at responding ‘yes’ to the correct probe when it was in the wrong place, and ąuicker when it was in the correct place. This shows that when a sign is placed in the wrong part of space, signers are madę to feel uncomfortable in some way. We can confirm from this that place-ment in space is important for building up a signer’s linguistic understanding.

However, morę importantly, the volunteers were ąuicker to recognise the probe .for GAS at the wrong location than they were to recpgnise the probe for PERFUME at the wrong location.They were ąuicker fo^GAS because no topographic image had been created. It took them longer to respond ‘yes’ for PERFUME when it was a probe in the wrong place because a topographic image had been created. This, again, suggests that the two types of space are treated differently in the brain.

BSLVERB TYPES

Now that we have seen that space is used for different functions in sign lan-guage, we can think about the way that verbs in BSL use these two different types of space. This is part of a larger consideration of the sort of information that a verb in BSL can include.

We have already seen in chapter 7 that very few, if any, verbs show information about tense (or, if they do, they do not use space to show this information) . Most verbs include information about aspect, but a few are very limited in the sorts of information they can include. These are the stative verbs we discussed in the previous chapter. They have also been called invariant verbs, although even these can include a smali amount of morphological information, e.g. the verbs KNOW and HAVE can include information about the signer’s attitude (‘deflnitely know’, ‘sorry to have’, etc.).

There are some verbs that carry aspectual information about events by changing their movement, but they carry no morę regular grammatical information than that. (Some can carry information about the direct object, as part of the handshape, and that will be discussed later.)

Pkiin verbs /.1S

A great many other BSL verbs use movement through space to show information about the subject and object (both direct and indirect). Many other BSL verbs use movement and location in space to show the movement and location of the object during the action of the verb.

SPACE AND VERBS

The difference in use of space is very important when We consider verbs. In some verbs, we have an image of a layout and the verbs move with their related objects through this image.That is, they use topographic space. In other verbs the location is part of the verb, and not part of any pre-existing layout.

For the rest of this chapter we will look at the way verbs use space in BSL. We will consider how verbs show the subject and object (direct and indirect) and the location of referents involved in the action.

When we consider different groups of verbs, we need to think about information that will tell us who is doing the action (the agent or, grammati-cally, the subject) and who or what is receiving the action (the goal or, grammatically, the object). For both the subject and object, we need to know if the person involved is the signer or someone else, and how many people or things are involved. We mentioned this earlier in chapter 3 when we compared personal pronouns in BSL and English. We saw that English pronouns can only tell us if one person or morę than one person is being referred to. BSL pronouns can tell us if one, two, three, four, many or each of several are being referred to. This same information can be shown in some BSL verbs.

With a elear idea of manner, aspect, person, and number, we can now discuss the different verb types in BSL.There are three basie classes of verbs in BSL, depending on what information they carry:

plain verbs - they can be modified to show manner, aspect and class of direct object;

agreement verbs ~ they can be modified to show manner, aspect, person, number, and class of'direct object; and

spati&Pverbs - they can be modified to show manner, aspect and location, movement, and related noun.

PLAIN VERBS

Examples of plain verbs are RIDE-A-BICYCLE, LOVE, RESEARCH, RUN, SMOKE, THINK, and UNDERSTAND,

These plain verbs show relatively little modification and do not move through space to show grammatical information. Most can show information about aspect, alfhough some do not (stative verbs like HAVE). Manner and