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Empirical Articles
Nouns and Verbs in Australian Sign Language: An Open and
Shut Case?
Trevor Johnston
Renwick College, University of Newcastle
Results of the noun-verb pair comprehension and production
tests from the Test Battery for Auslan Morphology and Syntax (Schembri et al., 2000) are re-presented, re-analyzed, and
compared to data from two other cases also dealing with
noun-verb pairs: the Auslan lexical database and a comparison of Auslan and American Sign Language (ASL) signs.
The data elicited through the test battery and presented in
this article confirm the existence of formationally related
noun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a single
movement and the noun displays a repeated movement. The
data also suggest that the best exemplars of noun-verb pairs
of this type in Auslan form a distinct set of iconic (mimetic)
signs archetypically based on inherently reversible actions
(such as opening and shutting). This strong iconic link perhaps explains why the derivational process appears to be of
limited productivity, though it does appear to have “spread”
to a number of signs that appear to have no such iconicity.
There appears to be considerable variability in the use of the
derivational markings, particularly in connected discourse,
even for signs of the “open and shut” variety. Overall, the
derivational process is apparently still closely linked to an
iconic base, is incipient in the grammar of Auslan, and is thus
best described as only partially grammaticalized.
Native signer intuitions, participant observation, observation of video recordings of natural and spontaneous signing, and elicitation of citation forms from naResearch for this article was partially supported by the Australian Research Council and the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (Sydney, Australia) under a Strategic Partnerships with Industry—Research
and Training (SPIRT) grant awarded to Associate Professor Greg Leigh
(Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children) and Professor Phil Foreman
(University of Newcastle). Correspondence should be sent to Trevor
Johnston, Renwick College, Faculty of Education, University of Newcastle, Private Bag 29, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia (e-mail: rctaj@
alinga.newcastle.edu.au).
 2001 Oxford University Press
tive informants were used in the earliest descriptions of
Australian Sign Language (Auslan) grammar and lexis
(Johnston, 1987, 1989a, 1989b). Subsequent discussion
of morphosyntax (transcription conventions, spatial
“agreement,” and the chaining, embedding, and subordination of clauses) was largely based on the close
transcription of natural signed texts (Johnston, 1991a,
1991b, 1996). Schembri (1996) used additional original
data, in conjunction with data already recorded in the
Auslan dictionary, to describe word formation processes in the language. Apart from the language teaching materials produced by the National Institute for
Deaf Studies at La Trobe University (Melbourne),
there has been no other descriptive work on Auslan
grammar in the past decade.
During this time, the only research toward describing and recording the language has been lexicographical. A second, completely revised edition of the Auslan
dictionary (Signs of Australia), was published in 1997.
The elicited lexical data on Auslan are now recorded in
three dictionaries I have written or edited (1989b, 1997,
1998). Though these data are peer reviewable, no other
Australian sign language researchers have yet taken up
the challenge to contest, or contribute to, the lexical
database of some 8,000 signs created from the data collected for these dictionaries.
More seriously, there have been no peer reviewable
and replicable language elicitation procedures on any
aspects of Auslan grammar as described in earlier or
preliminary studies. No one had attempted to confirm
or extend grammatical observations based on the elic-
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
itation of language in controlled situations. This article
is one of a series that has begun to address this problem
by grounding grammatical observations of Auslan
grammar in replicable or peer reviewable empirical data.
Inflectional and Derivational Morphology of
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
In Auslan, many lexical signs appear to function as
nouns, verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech (i.e.,
grammatical word class or, alternatively, grammatical
sign class). In particular, many signs may be used in
context as nouns or verbs without any apparent overt
morphological marking of grammatical sign class. Lexical semantics, the context of utterance, the co-text and
the immediate syntactic environment (the presence and
co-occurrence of pronouns, adverbs, quantifiers, etc.)
mean that ambiguity or lack of clarity is rarely a
problem.
Other lexical signs belong to only one grammatical
sign class. In particular, some signs can be used only as
nouns or verbs, not both. Importantly, these signs also
do not appear to carry any systematic morphological
marking of grammatical sign class membership.
In distinction to these two types of signs, some
Auslan lexical signs appear to function as nouns and
verbs and to carry a morphological marking when
functioning as a member of each grammatical sign
class. The nominal and verbal signs appear to form a
pair that is derivationally or at least formationally related. In these pairs of signs, nouns frequently display
a restrained movement pattern, whereas verbs are often
performed with a continuous movement. This observation of Auslan nouns and verbs (Johnston, 1989b) was
prompted by, and based on reports of, the derivational
and inflectional morphology of nouns and verbs in
American Sign Language (ASL) (Supalla & Newport,
1978).
According to Supalla and Newport (1978), the
nominal form of the underlying sign in a derivationally
related noun-verb pair always displays a repeated
movement in a restrained manner. Whereas the verbal
form of the underlying sign could display either a single
or repeated movement, which may itself be either unidirectional or bidirectional, the manner of movement
of verbs is always continuous or hold. Examination of
Auslan fieldwork data (notebooks and video recordings) revealed that a similar distinction between some
nouns and verbs could be found in Auslan. This was
supported by native signer intuitions. Interviews and
elicitation sessions with other native signers appeared
to confirm the existence of noun-verb pairs in the language. Indeed, many of the pairs identified in Supalla
and Newport (1978) were identical in both languages
(see Case 3 below). The ASL researchers qualified
their original observations by noting that this derivational morphology for nouns and verbs in ASL was
most consistently found with “concrete” entities and
actions.
Though the pattern of restrained and repeated
movement in nouns was also observed in Auslan, it was
unclear if nouns of this type regularly formed a pair
with a derivationally related verb having a continuous
or hold movement. Moreover, textual data (video recordings) suggested that the marking of nouns and
verbs in this way was not consistently made in connected discourse. On the other hand, the distinction
did seem to be frequently made by informants during
elicitation sessions when they produced isolated citation forms, or when participants produced a pair of
signs (juxtaposing the noun with the verb) in response
to probes. In the latter case, the informant apparently
intended to set up the two forms as a minimal pair to
highlight this very difference in form and meaning. In
light of these observations, and despite identifying a
similar process in Auslan, I have cautioned that “the
distinction of nouns from verbs is not made as systematically in Auslan as it appears to be in studies of ASL”
(1989b, p. 226).
Case 1: Data From the Test Battery for Auslan
Morphology and Syntax
The Test Battery for Auslan Morphology and Syntax
(TBAMS)—a structured and replicable sign language
comprehension and production elicitation test—was
prepared by researchers at Macquarie University and
Renwick College (Schembri et al., 1997). It is an adaptation of the Test Battery for American Sign Language
Morphology and Syntax (Supalla et al., in press),
which uses the comprehension, and proper production, of the nominal-verbal distinction as one of several
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
indicators of proficiency in ASL. Importantly, the ASL
test battery is careful to select nouns and verbs that
may be considered “concrete” and thus highly likely to
display the pattern.
Unlike the ASL test battery, TBAMS was intended
as a means of collecting data on Auslan and not to test
for levels of proficiency. The ASL test battery was designed to elicit from participants responses that required the use or comprehension of a range of known
morphological and syntactic features of the language.
Though Auslan has been described as similarly displaying nearly all of these features (Johnston, 1989b),
there have been no structured, controlled, and replicable elicitation sessions to confirm this empirically.
The TBAMS was intended as the first step in confirmation.
Interestingly, as Launer (1982) pointed out, no
source was given for the data in the original identification of noun-verb pairs and in the description of this
derivational process in ASL (Supalla & Newport,
1978). Her doctoral dissertation, a study of the acquisition of this derivational process by ASL-using children, includes a small assessment of the presence and
productivity of the process in data elicited from adult
native signers of ASL (not more than 10 participants).
This study appears to be the only one available in the
literature and may even be the only one ever conducted.
The TBAMS has been administered only to adult
native signers with the intention of confirming that native signers do, in fact, display these morphological and
syntactic features as part of their normal language production in Auslan. Schembri et al. (in press) have reported on some preliminary results from the application of the TBAMS to adult native signers in Sydney
and Melbourne.
In this article, I wish to focus on only two of the
tests in the battery, both dealing with noun and verb
morphology: the noun-verb production test (NVP) and
the noun-verb comprehension test (NVC). Until the
data were collected as part of the TBAMS, there was
simply no way of knowing how extensive and systematic noun and verb pairs were in the language.
With respect to noun and verb morphology, the
ASL test battery (and, consequently, the TBAMS) was
designed to test for modification of the movement pa-
237
rameter between noun and verb pairs. Only noun-verb
pairs in which the verbal form has a single unidirectional continuous or hold movement are part of the
elicitation set in order to maximally distinguish them
from nouns. Naturally, according to the description of
derivational process in ASL, (and, presumably, Auslan), if these signs are members of noun-verb pairs in
the language, the nominal form will always display a
repeated and restrained movement.
A repeated movement—one of the indicators of
nominalization in this context—is far easier for a researcher to observe and record than is a restrained
movement, as Launer (1982) also observed. Consequently, in this first analysis of the data elicited through
the TBAMS, nouns are coded only for the presence or
absence of a repeated movement. Because the data have
not been coded for continuous or restrained movement, I am unable to show if the quality, rather than
the number, of movements is also strongly associated
with nouns in noun-verb pairs. Noun and verb signs
elicited in the test may, in fact, also be consistently distinguished by the quality rather than (or not just only
by) the number of movements. Indeed, I assume this to
be the case, even though I am actually unable to show
it from the data, as yet.
Case 1: Method
The aim and design of these tasks have been described
fully in Schembri et al. (in press). Briefly, the tasks
were designed to elicit responses to stimuli that could
be coded, quantified, and compared across participants. The participants were all adult native signers of
Auslan—14 from Sydney, 8 from Melbourne, 3 from
elsewhere. In the first task, they were required to produce sentences or phrases that elicited specific nouns
and verbs, and, in a second task, to identify target signs
produced by a filmed sign model as either nouns or
verbs by selecting one of several pictures depicting objects or actions.
The aim of the first (production) task was to determine whether differences in the number of movements
occurred in a selection of Auslan signs that appeared to
form noun-verb pairs as described in the literature and
were predicted from consultation with native signers.
Signed responses were elicited from each participant
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Table 1 Target noun-verb pairs in the noun-verb production (NVP) test of the TBAMS
Target noun
Target verb
Native signer intuitions
on n-v pairing
PLANE
BOOK
BAG
CUPBOARD
CAMERA
CHAIR
DOOR
DOORBELL
KNOB
DRAWER
GUN
HEADPHONES
KEY
LIGHTER
PLUG
RING
ROCKET
SCISSORS
UMBRELLA
WINDOW
FLY-IN-PLANE
OPEN-BOOK
PICK-UP-BAG
OPEN-CUPBOARD
TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH
SIT
OPEN-DOOR
PRESS-DOORBELL
TURN-KNOB
OPEN-DRAWER
SHOOT-GUN
PUT-ON-HEADPHONES
TURN-KEY
FLICK-LIGHTER
PLUG-IN
PUT-ON-RING
TAKE-OFF-ROCKET
CUT-WITH-SCISSORS
OPEN-UMBRELLA
CLOSE-WINDOW
No/doubtful
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Doubtful/yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No
Yes
Doubtful
Yes
after each of 30 filmed skits. After watching each skit,
the participant was asked to describe what had happened. Each skit was designed to elicit one or two target nouns or verbs, which were assumed to be members
of 20 noun-verb pairs (see Table 1). Overall, there were
40 target nouns and verbs. The participants’ responses
were videotaped for later analysis.
The aim of the second (comprehension) test was to
determine if native signers interpreted differences in
the number of movements in these target signs as signalling a morphological distinction between derivationally related nouns and verbs in Auslan. Each sign
was produced in isolation in a short film clip, and no
other morpho-syntactic cues were provided. The participant was asked to select, after watching each clip,
one of two pictures that best illustrated the meaning of
the observed sign. There was a separate page of illustrations for each sign performed. One illustration depicted an action (such as “shooting a gun”), and the
other an illustration depicted an object (such as a gun).
In other words, participants simply had to identify the
stimulus sign as a noun or a verb.
Informal consultation with native signers suggested that at least 14 of the 20 target noun-verb pairs
from the ASL test battery also appeared to exhibit a
similar morphological distinction in Auslan. A further
two were possible candidates, and four were not
thought to exhibit the pattern or realized this distinction differently. Thus, part of the aim of the tests was to
assess the accuracy of these intuitions and judgments.
Case 1: Results
I will present the data on noun-verb morphology in
two ways—first, with the target nouns and verbs considered simply as two sign classes and, second, with
target nouns and target verbs considered individually.
In the first presentation, I give percentages of the number of tokens of target nouns and verbs produced in
response to, or correctly identified from, the stimulus
film. In the second presentation, I give the number and
percentage of signers who correctly produced, or correctly identified, each target noun and verb individually.
The Noun-Verb Production Task
The results of the NVP test can be understood in several different ways according to what sign forms are
typically produced by native signers for nouns and
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
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Figure 1 Elicited form of noun and verb targets.
verbs. The first includes movement repetition, as predicted by and specifically coded for in the test. The
second applies only to the elicited responses in the production test. It involves two other possible alternative
strategies for marking or distinguishing nouns and
verbs in Auslan that emerged from further examination
of the elicited data—mouthing and juxtaposition. I
discuss each of these three strategies in turn. Of
course, there are other ways that Auslan—or any language—may mark or distinguish nouns and verbs (e.g.,
through context, lexis, or sign order and syntax); however, this study does not address this issue.
Repeated movement versus single movement. Given the nature of the elicitation test and the nature of the coding
instructions for responses, one can first compare the
form of all target nouns and verbs with respect to repeated and single movements. Figure 1 shows the number of participants who responded using a sign with a
repeated movement when the target sign was a noun
and a single movement when the target sign was a verb.
More than 57% of target nouns did indeed display
a repeated movement pattern, and more than 79% of
target verbs involved a single movement. Only 6% of
target verbs displayed a repeated movement pattern.
However, significant numbers of target nouns (25%)
also displayed a single movement pattern. In terms of
the original ASL test battery, therefore, approximately
68% of overall responses were as expected. (This result
is almost identical to that of Launer [1982, p. 97]—of
eight adult native ASL signers tested, she found that
67% of overall responses were accurate.)
In addition, as the table shows, other forms besides
the target were sometimes produced in response to the
stimulus film. These included fingerspelling, failure to
use an appropriate target sign verb or noun (i.e., not
producing a verb or noun as expected by either not referring to a participant or process at all, or using a general sign such as “thing”), or using a sign unrelated to
the noun-verb pairs focused on (e.g., producing an appropriate verb but one that had no related nominal
form, or vice versa). In a few other cases, the form of
the sign in question could not be deciphered.
Figure 2 shows this same data while identifying the
individual nouns and verbs themselves. Of the 20 target
nominal items, the results show that only two of the
target nouns are produced by all participants with a repeated movement (DOOR, LIGHTER).
Of the remaining target nominal items, a further
11 were produced by the majority of participants with
a repeated, restrained movement (BAG, BOOK,
DRAWER, KEY, SCISSORS, CAMERA, WINDOW,
GUN, CUPBOARD, KNOB, RING). One target
noun (CHAIR) was made with a repeated movement
by just six participants, and a further five target nouns
(DOORBELL, PLUG, ROCKET, HEADPHONES,
PLANE) rarely exhibit a repeated movement (less than
five participants produced this form in each case). One
target noun (UMBRELLA) was not produced with a
repeated movement by any participant.
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
Figure 2 Elicited form of individual target nouns and verbs (nouns in lower case, verbs in upper case).
All 20 of the target verbs were produced with a
single, continuous movement by at least six of the participants. Whereas only two target verbs (OPENUMBRELLA and PUT-ON-HEADPHONES) had
a single continuous movement produced by all 25 participants, 11 other verbs (PRESS-DOORBELL,
PUT-ON-RING, CLOSE-WINDOW, OPEN-CUPBOARD, PLUG-IN, OPEN-DOOR, PICK-UP-BAG,
FLY-IN-PLANE, SIT, and TAKE-OFF-ROCKET)
were realized by signs with a single continuous movement by all signers, if both target and unrelated forms
are included in one group. Only the seven remaining verbs (CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, TURN-KEY,
OPEN-DRAWER, TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH, FLICKLIGHTER, SHOOT-GUN, and TURN-KNOB) were
not consistently performed with single continuous
movements by all informants. Of these, five verbs
(CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, TURN-KEY, OPENDRAWER, TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH, and FLICKLIGHTER) were realized with single continuous
movements by 22 or more participants. In other words,
only two signs (SHOOT-GUN and TURN-KNOB)
were complete outliers, produced by a significant number of participants with a repeated movement.
Mouthing. In the transcription and coding of the material elicited through the TBAMS, the mouthing of English words was frequent and apparently favored with
target nouns (see also Schembri et al., 2000). Subsequent analysis of the data, scoring for the presence or
absence of mouthing with nouns and verbs produced
in response to the stimulus film clip—whether the target sign or some other noun sign produced in lieu of
the target—revealed that this correlation of mouthing
with nouns was real and pronounced.
As Figure 3 shows, more than 316 (69.6%) of the
signed noun responses were accompanied by a clearly
mouthed English word, whereas only 64 (13.1%) of the
signed verb responses were also accompanied by the
mouthing of an English word. The English word that
was mouthed was almost always the English word
found in the gloss, with only a few exceptions (e.g.,
“pistol” is mouthed by two signers instead of “gun”).
Figure 4 presents the data for each target sign individually. One target noun (BAG) was accompanied by a
mouthing by 24 participants. A further 11 target nouns
(DOOR, KEY, CAMERA, CHAIR, GUN, PLANE,
UMBRELLA, BOOK, RING, LIGHTER, and WINDOW) were mouthed by at least 18 test participants.
With the inclusion of DRAWER, CUPBOARD, and
ROCKET, mouthed by just over half of all participants,
16 of 20 target nouns were mouthed by the majority
of signers.
Five of the 20 target nouns appear to be exceptions:
SCISSORS, PLUG, DOORBELL, HEADPHONES,
and KNOB. From the videotape record, it appears that
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
241
Figure 3 Mouthing of noun and verb responses.
three of these signs (PLUG, HEADPHONES, and
KNOB) were essentially “nameless” (in English) for
most of the participants. They appeared not to know
what the objects in question were called in English,
even though they had no problem producing a sign for
each of them that was perfectly clear in context. (These
participants are recorded on the video record asking
the tester what the object was that they had just seen.
To avoid giving the participants a leading answer—by
using the target sign—the tester simply fingerspelled
the English word.) One object in the elicitation video,
a doorbell, was not immediately recognized as such by
many of the participants. This may explain why only
only two participants mouthed DOORBELL. Finally,
only only 12 participants mouthed SCISSORS, a common lexicalized sign. There appears to be no ready explanation for this. If we disregard three of these problematic signs (PLUG, HEADPHONES, and KNOB)
in our assessment of mouthing, then the overwhelming
majority of noun responses was accompanied by
mouthing.
Target verbs were mouthed in only a minority of
cases. Indeed, more than a quarter of informants did
not mouth a single target verb. Two target verbs
(TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH and TURN-KNOB) were
not mouthed by any signers, and a further 11 target
verbs (FLY-IN-PLANE, CLOSE-WINDOW, PUTON-RING, CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, PLUG-IN,
PRESS-DOORBELL, FLICK-LIGHTER, PICKUP-BAG, PUT-ON-HEADPHONES, SHOOTGUN, and TAKE-OFF-ROCKET) were accompanied
by mouthing by fewer than four informants. Of the
seven target verbs with a higher frequency of mouthing, none was mouthed by more than 12 participants.
Juxtaposition. The second additional feature observed
in the data related to the juxtaposition of nominal and
verbal forms in a signed response. I have suggested
elsewhere that the putative distinction between nominal and verbal forms in Auslan was often best observed
when informants juxtaposed the two forms as a minimal pair (Johnston, 1989b), rather than being a distinction regularly made or observed in connected discourse. This phenomenon seemed to be manifested in
the research for this article and, one assumes, in the
native signer reflections that informed Supalla and
Newport (1978). When going through the list of 100
noun-verb pairs (and, especially, the subset of 20 chosen for the test battery), native signers who understand
the grammatical distinction between nouns and verbs
had little problem producing two distinct sign forms—
a nominal one and a verbal one—for the majority of
the listed items. The two forms were juxtaposed as a
minimal pair, which undoubtedly highlighted their
phonological differences.
However, I observed that juxtaposition frequently
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
Figure 4 Number of mouthings for each individual target sign (nouns in lower case,
verbs in upper case).
occurred in naturalistic data (the nominal and verbal
forms of a noun-verb pair co-occurred in a phrase, immediately next to each other). That is, juxtaposition itself was a common and frequent environment for observing clearly articulated nominal and verbal forms,
rather than the individual forms occurring alone in a
clause with appropriate modification for grammatical
sign class. I suspected that the weakness of the pattern
could partially explain this—the juxtaposition was
needed to specify or disambiguate the action. The elic-
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
243
Figure 5 Percentage target nouns and verbs that occur juxtaposed with the corresponding
nominal or verbal form of the sign in the same clause.
ited responses were thus coded for instances of juxtaposition to see if this was indeed a marked pattern.
Juxtaposition was not equally distributed across
target nouns and verbs. As Figure 5 shows, of the target
verbs, 28% were juxtaposed with the nominal form,
while only 6% of the target nouns were in environments
where they were juxtaposed with the verbal form.
As Figure 6 shows, the distribution of juxtaposition
across target verbs themselves was also uneven. Six
target verbs (CLOSE-WINDOW, PUT-ON-RING,
FLICK-LIGHTER, OPEN-UMBRELLA, OPENBOOK, and PICK-UP-BAG) were juxtaposed with related nominal signs by the majority of participants (but
none by more than 18 out of 25 potential informants).
The remainder of the juxtaposed target verbs was
found with a minority of signers only: 3 signs (OPENCUPBOARD, SHOOT-GUN, and OPEN-DOOR)
had 10 or 9 tokens of juxtaposition, and 11 signs had
less than 6 tokens, most with only 3, 2, or 1. One target
verb (TURN-KNOB) was not juxtaposed with a related nominal sign by any participant.
The Noun-Verb Comprehension Task
In terms of the comprehension of and response to a
signed stimulus, the expected pattern of repeated
movement associated with nominals and single move-
ment associated with verbals was much more consistent than in the production test (see Figure 7).
More than 90.4% (226) of all stimulus verbs were
identified as verbs, and more than 67.6% (169) of all
stimulus nouns were identified as nouns. Of overall responses from the 25 participants, therefore, approximately 79% were as expected. (This compares with
96% accurate identifications by eight adult native signers of ASL as reported in Launer [1982, p. 97].) A few
stimulus signs were identified as either or both nouns
and verbs. As Figure 8 makes clear, one sign (UMBRELLA) accounts for most of the cases when a stimulus sign was assigned equally to nominal and verbal
status.
Of the 20 target signs in Figure 8, 12 appeared to
be quite consistently interpreted as either nouns
(BAG, GUN, LIGHTER, WINDOW) or verbs
(OPEN-DRAWER, FLY-IN-PLANE, CUT-WITHSCISSORS,
TURN-KEY,
PUT-ON-HEADPHONES, OPEN-DOOR, TAKE-PHOTO, PLUGIN) by almost all of the participants. For an additional
four items (PUT-ON-RING, OPEN-BOOK, CUPBOARD, ROCKET), a majority of participants responded in the expected way, but a substantial minority
responded differently. For the remaining four items
(KNOB, DOORBELL, CHAIR, UMBRELLA), the
responses were mixed.
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
Figure 6 Number of elicited response clauses in which the target sign is juxtaposed with the
corresponding nominal or verbal form of the sign in the same clause (nouns in lower case, verbs
in upper case).
Case 1: Discussion
Number (and Quality) of Movements
Though the NVP task appears to successfully elicit a
number of target noun-verb pairs from Auslan signers,
only a few nominal signs were consistently marked
with a repeated movement by the overwhelming major-
ity of participants. Table 2 summarizes the NVP and
NVC results.
As reported in Schembri et al. (2000), repeated
movement was not used by most of the participants for
a number of target nouns: CHAIR, DOORBELL,
PLUG, ROCKET, HEADPHONES, PLANE, and
UMBRELLA. CHAIR and PLUG had variant forms
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
245
Figure 7 Identification of stimulus nouns and verbs.
strongly associated individually with nominal and verbal meanings even if, for some signers, noun-verb pairs
do exist with each of these variants. Consequently,
many signers used one form of PLUG with a “three”
handshape (ASL “six” handshape) as a nominal and
another form with a “bent-L” handshape as the verbal
form. Similarly, there were at least five different forms
of CHAIR. In the data, some of the forms were
strongly associated with a nominal meaning but had
only one single movement. It was concluded that the
use of these variants might be one reason why these
two signs, at least, scored so poorly as forms with a repeated movement.
Other target nouns in this low-scoring group included DOORBELL, ROCKET, and PLANE. The
first two objects were not immediately recognized
when seen in the stimulus film by many participants,
and many used a descriptive phrase rather than a lexical sign. With respect to DOORBELL, had the doorbell been recognized as such, then one can assume
many more signers would have used a lexical sign that
would have included a repeated movement. Finally, the
last two target nouns in this group (ROCKET and
PLANE) appeared not to have nominal forms that
were distinguishable for the verbal forms (TAKEOFF-ROCKET and FLY-IN-PLANE) by way of repetition. This was contrary to the expectation in the
ASL data but somewhat in line with native signer intuitions for Auslan (as shown in Table 2).
With respect to target verbs, several (TAKE-OFFROCKET, SIT, and FLY-IN-PLANE) did not always
appear in the expected forms, but still displayed a
single movement pattern. They either used alternative
handshapes (e.g., the middle-finger hand instead of the
index-finger hand for TAKE-OFF-ROCKET), used
another lexical sign (SIT), or portrayed the situation
differently due to considerations of scale and perspective (FLY-IN-PLANE). In the latter case, for example,
many singers used a proform “classifier” (the index
finger) to represent the referent and its movement (the
object in the stimulus film was a small model plane).
Unexpectedly, four target verbs appeared to exhibit
a repeated movement (TURN-KNOB, SHOOTGUN, FLICK-LIGHTER, and TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH). Though the number of repeated tokens was
quite low for two of these target verbs (3 for both
FLICK-LIGHTER and TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH), it
was considerably higher for the other two (TURNKNOB and SHOOT-GUN), with 12 and 9 tokens, respectively.
These four signs may represent (1) target verbs that
had a repeated movement in their citation form for
some of the test participants (this appears unlikely), (2)
target verbs modified for interative aspect (there is
nothing in the stimulus film that would appear to
prompt this interpretation of the action and this appears unlikely), or (3) not verbs at all but, rather, nominal signs that name the action without any reference to
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
Figure 8 Identification of individual stimulus nouns and verbs (nouns in lower case, verbs
in upper case).
an agent or an object, much as a gerund in English (this
seems plausible).
In other words, these responses could be seen as
containing nonfinite clauses or circumstantial adjuncts.
Thus, instead of signing something like sentence 1, below, as the expected response, the TBAMS participants produced something like sentences 2 or 3, which
may be easily, and mistakenly, confused with 4.
1. There’s an egg in an egg carton and someone
shoots at it with a water pistol.
2. There’s an egg in an egg carton, with shooting
(of a water pistol) (going on).
3. There’s an egg in an egg carton and there’s
shooting at it (with a water pistol) (by someone).
4. There’s an egg in an egg carton and someone is
shooting at it with a water pistol.
In this way, these “exceptions” may prove to be tokens
of nouns that actually do display a repeated movement,
as expected.
With the comprehension test data, some of the un-
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
247
Table 2 Target noun-verb pairs in the TBAMS
Noun
Verb
Reversible?
Expectation
PLANE
BOOK
BAG
CUPBOARD
CAMERA
CHAIR
DOOR
DOORBELL
KNOB
DRAWER
GUN
HEADPHONES
KEY
LIGHTER
PLUG
RING
ROCKET
SCISSORS
UMBRELLA
WINDOW
FLY-IN-PLANE
OPEN-BOOK
PICK-UP-BAG
OPEN-CUPBOARD
TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH
SIT
OPEN-DOOR
PRESS-DOORBELL
TURN-KNOB
OPEN-DRAWER
SHOOT-GUN
PUT-ON-HEAD
TURN-KEY
FLICK-LIGHTER
PLUG-IN
PUT-ON-RING
TAKE-OFF-ROCKET
CUT-WITH-SCISSORS
OPEN-UMBRELLA
CLOSE-WINDOW
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Doubtful
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No
Yes
Doubtful
Yes
Outcome:
Production
Outcome:
Comprehension
Nouns
Verbs
(repeated) (single)
Nouns
as nouns
Verbs as verbs
4%
92%
96%
60%
92%
24%
100%
12%
56%
92%
72%
8%
92%
100%
8%
52%
8%
92%
0%
84%
57%
NA
NA
100%
76%
NA
32%
NA
60%
60%
NA
100%
NA
NA
88%
NA
NA
20%
NA
48%
92%
67%
100%
72%
NA
NA
96%
NA
100%
NA
NA
96%
NA
88%
88%
NA
92%
72%
NA
100%
NA
NA
90%
64%
80%
84%
92%
84%
32%
88%
96%
48%
88%
64%
100%
92%
76%
92%
96%
24%
96%
100%
92%
79%
NA ⫽ not applicable.
In the comprehension task, only a nominal or verbal sign from each of the 20 noun-verb pairs was used. Therefore, for each
noun-verb pair, one cell, “target noun” or “target verb,” is marked NA.
expected responses appear to reflect the patterns of lexical variation in Auslan noun-verb pairs discussed earlier (e.g., PUT-ON-RING, CUPBOARD, ROCKET,
CHAIR, PLUG-IN), whereas others appear to reflect
difficulties in interpreting what was being depicted in
the illustrations (e.g., the picture intended to depict the
object “plane” was interpreted by many participants as
the action “plane landing”). Others appear to reflect the
fact that some signs, inexplicably, simply did not confirm to the expected pattern (e.g., UMBRELLA). The
suggested reasons for the mixed responses in some other
cases (e.g., KNOB, DOORBELL) have been given above.
Finally, as also observed in Schembri et al. (2000),
some signers reported that other factors played a part
in some responses. For example, some participants ignored what they would normally interpret as a verbal
sign (OPEN-BOOK), instead interpreting it as a nominal sign (BOOK), because the picture depicting the
verbal meaning showed a thick book being opened.
They reasoned that the signer in the stimulus film must
mean the object, not the action, because the handshape
would have been modified to incorporate information
about the size of the book being opened if the action
were the intended meaning.
Overall, 57% of target nouns were produced with
a repeated movement and approximately 79% of target
verbs were made with a single movement; 90% of stimulus verbs were identified as verbs, and 67% of stimulus nouns were identified as nouns. Though crosslinguistically, derivational processes commonly are of
restricted productivity, unlike inflectional processes,
which are more parsimonious, the results, one may
presume, are somewhat less than one would expect,
given that the original ASL examples were chosen specifically as good exemplars of this pattern in that language. In the majority of cases, native Auslan signers
consulted about the list of items had agreed that the
examples fit the pattern.
As shown in Table 2, some of the target signs appeared to represent poor examples of potential noun-
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
verb pairs in Auslan, and this was confirmed by the results of the TBAMS. One could argue that, had other,
better exemplars been chosen, the percentage of nouns
and verbs with the expected movement patterns could
well have been higher, creating the impression of a systematic grammaticalized morphological process. Not
surprisingly, if we were to remove some of the problematic examples from the list of noun-verb pairs and
substitute noun-verb pairs that display much less variation, then the association of repeated forms with
nominalization would appear much stronger and systematic. (This should only be expected if test items are
being selected on this very basis—as a way of testing
proficiency—but somewhat misleading if we are using
the items to collect data to establish the existence of
derivational morphology.)
However, as I explain in the next section, an examination the best exemplars of noun-verb pairs in the two
tests not only tells us which additional potential nounverb pairs would be suitable for inclusion in an improved version of the test, it also indicates both the
limits of the test itself and, significantly, the possible
limits of noun-verb pairing in Auslan.
Iconicity and the Number of Movements in NounVerb Pairs
On examination, it becomes evident that most of the
signs in the elicitation set have an underlying iconicity
in which an inherent reversibility in the action motivates this iconicity. This reversibility typically involves
a movement in one of two directions such as opening or shutting, turning clockwise or anti-clockwise,
pulling out or pushing in, and, marginally, putting on
or taking off. Signs of this type in the elicitation
set include OPEN-BOOK, PICK-UP-BAG, OPENCUPBOARD,
OPEN-DOOR,
TURN-KNOB,
OPEN-DRAWER, TURN-KEY, PLUG-IN, PUTON-RING, OPEN-UMBRELLA, and CLOSEWINDOW).
I would suggest that it is this that really lies behind
the observation by Supalla and Newport (1978) that
“concrete” signs are the best exemplars of noun-verb
derivational morphology. The signs themselves do not
represent concrete entities and actions; rather, the
underlying iconicity of the signs is concrete (essentially
a reversible action). It would appear that in a sign with
this type of underlying iconicity, a single movement in
either of one of the two possible directions is interpreted as that action as a process (i.e., a verb); and that a
(restrained) repetition of the movement in this type of
sign appears to name or refer to a salient participant in
that process (i.e., a noun) or the process as a participant (i.e.,
a noun/gerund).
A small subset of these concrete actions involve a
kind of pushing or pulling that might be best described
as actions that engage or disengage a mechanism. The
reversibility in these signs is less evident because the
action is effective only in one direction, or the mechanism in question usually returns to the disengaged position when the action is stopped (e.g., pulling a trigger
on a gun, flicking a lighter, pressing a button, operating
a pair of scissors). The signer, though, is forced to reverse the movement in order to perform another action
of the same type. Examples from the elicitation set
include TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH, PRESS-DOORBELL, SHOOT-GUN, FLICK-LIGHTER, and
CUT-WITH-SCISSORS.
The few noun signs in the test battery that fail to
follow the pattern, and whose lack of repetition cannot
be accounted for by some other factor (e.g., by the failure to recognize the object and produce the appropriate
lexical noun, like DOORBELL), do not appear to have
an inherent reversible movement of this type, with the
single exception of UMBRELLA. The signs include
CHAIR, ROCKET, HEADPHONES, and PLANE.
The movement in each appears (1) to have no iconic
value as a movement (CHAIR), (2) to not be normally
reversible (ROCKET, PLANE), or (3) to be simply not
salient for many signers (HEADPHONES).
Thus, where a clearly iconic reversible or disengaging movement is not present, the putative derivational
process involving repetition appears to be far from systematic, and somewhat haphazard. Though the percentages of accurate or expected responses involving
sign production from both ASL and Auslan signers
were similar indeed (67% vs. 68%), Launer (1982)
does not indicate by gloss which signs, if any, were less
likely to be given the canonical noun or verb marking.
I am thus unable to say if variable responses were also
more likely with ASL signs that did not have a highly
mimetic inherently reversible movement.
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
249
Table 3 Noun-verb triads
Process
Participant
Single movement in 1 direction
Single movement in
reverse direction
Repeated movement in one
direction or bidirectional
movement
First verb
Second verb
Noun/gerund
Inherently
reversible
action
Lexicalized
Pseudo-lex.
Lexicalized
Pseudo-lex.
Lexicalized
Pseudo-lex.
Opening vs.
shutting
OPENWINDOW
SHUTWINDOW
Shut flat surfaced
object
WINDOW
Windowopening
Clockwise vs.
anti-clockwise
TURN-ONTAP
Open/separate
flat surface
object(s)
Turn fist-sized
object clockwise
TURN-OFF
TAP
Tap-turning
Pulling vs.
pushing
OPENDRAWER
Pull twohandled object
toward yourself
with two hands
CLOSEDRAWER
DRAWER
Pulling or
pushing
handled object
Putting on vs.
taking off
PUT-ONRING
Put something
small on your
finger
TAKEOFF-RING
Turn fist-sized
object anticlockwise
Push twohandled object
away from
yourself with
two hands
Take something
small off your
finger
RING
Putting on or
taking off a
ring-like
object
Furthermore, from the best exemplars of the pattern in the TBAMS data presented in Table 2, it would
seem that most of the archetypical noun-verb “pairs”
in which the nominal sign displays a repeated movement and the verbal sign displays a single movement
are actually noun-verb triads. In each of these triads,
there are two verbal signs that each consist of one of the
directionally opposed movements of a concrete action.
(Incidentally, recognition of these noun-verb triads
seems to exist in the ASL teaching literature. In Signing
Naturally [Lentz, 1988], a course book for teachers and
students of ASL, some of the first noun-verb pairs students are introduced to are actually listed as triads [e.g.,
DOOR, OPEN-DOOR, CLOSE-DOOR, WINDOW,
OPEN-WINDOW, CLOSE-WINDOW]).
Often the verbal sign is weakly lexicalized or has a
general meaning. The third element of the triad is the
related nominal sign, which displays a repeated movement in one of these directions or a full cycle of the two
directions—at least one movement in one direction
and at least one movement in the other. It is not unusual for a nominal of this sort to do one and a half
cycles (i.e., it has at least three beats). Nominals of this
type appear to be fairly stable lexemes.
In their original description of noun-verb pairs in
ASL, Supalla and Newport (1978) did suggest that the
term noun-verb pairs was somewhat of an oversimplification. Each nominal sign was actually linked to a
“family” of verb signs, not a single verb sign. However,
in their description of this family of verb signs, no
mention is made of the inherent reversibility of the mimetic action in the iconic base of the signs in question.
Instead, they refer to the existence of numerous modified forms of a verbal sign that are all equally “paired”
with the nominal. They give the example of the nounverb pair LAWNMOWER/MOW. Its “family of
verbs,” according to Supalla and Newport, includes not
only MOW but also GIVE-THE-LAWNMOWERA-PUSH,
MOW-IN-A-FIGURE-8,
MOWIN-A-CIRCLE, MOW-UP-AND-DOWN-SMALLBUMPY-HILLS, and so forth. This is not what I am
suggesting here.
Table 3 lists examples of each kind of these reversible concrete signs, with glosses. The nominal sign
(representing the name of the action in question such
as window-opening, tap-turning, etc., or the name of
an object closely associated with the action such as window, tap, etc.) has a rapidly repeated movement. The
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
Table 4 Noun-verb dyads
Process
Participant
Verb
Noun/gerund
Engaging movement in 1 direction
Disengaging
movement in
reverse direction
Repeated movement in one direction
Underlying action
Lexicalized
Pseudo-lex.
Meaningless action
Lexicalized
Pseudo-lex.
Engaging
(flicking/
squeezing) vs.
disengaging
(releasing)
SHOOT-GUN
Pull or squeeze
on something
with your finger
Push down on
something with
your finger
Push down on
something with
your thumb
GUN
Shooting
PHOTOGRAPH
Photographing
Photography
LIGHTER
Lighting up
TAKEPHOTOGRAPH
FLICKLIGHTER
movement in the nominal form can be viewed as a
movement in each of the two directions one after the
other or as a repetition (often more than simply once)
of one of the movements in one of the directions. I suggest that the restrained repetition of the iconic movement (i.e., the mime) somehow “de-mimics” the action
while retaining the iconic link (cf. the discussion of restrained movement in Johnston [1991a]). I also suggest
that, without any other participants being mentioned
in a clause, and without any other modifications of the
movement of the sign, the repeated form of overtly
iconic and inherently reversible movements is interpreted as an object associated with the action (or more
rarely, as a name for the action or process itself). The
signs WINDOW, TAP, DRAWER, and RING are the
third element (the noun) of the four noun-verb triads
listed in Table 3.
The remaining good exemplars of repetition marking for nominal status are all of the “engage/disengage” subtype, which, by their very nature, are dyads
or pairs, there being no meaningful second action in
the disengaging part of the cycle. Some are illustrated
in Table 4.
Auslan thus appears to have some noun-verb triads
and dyads in which the nominal and verbal forms of
a sign are distinguished by some modification of the
movement parameter of the underlying sign—single
for verbs, repeated for nouns. Native signer intuitions
support the notion that it is also highly likely that the
movement quality varies in a predictable way in these
pairs—continuous or hold for verbs, and restrained for
nouns—but the data from the TBAMS have not yet
been analyzed for this. Significantly, the data suggest
that the pattern is best exemplified by signs with a certain type of underlying iconicity: namely, inherently
reversible concrete actions.
Mouthing
As reported above, mouthing was strongly associated
with nominal signs. Indeed, more nominal signs in the
elicited data set were accompanied by mouthing
(69.9%) than displayed a repeated (and, presumably,
restrained) movement pattern (57.2%). Of verbal signs
in the elicited data, only 13.1% co-occurred with
mouthing.
Ironically, the link of mouthing with “nominalization” was strengthened even when the co-articulated
sign was clearly verbal. In the majority of cases where
there was mouthing accompanying the production of
a target verb, the mouthing named the object involved
in the action and not the action itself. Indeed, the two
verbal signs with the highest number of simultaneous
mouthings (OPEN-UMBRELLA with 12 tokens and
OPEN-DRAWER with 10 tokens) were almost always
accompanied by a mouthing that named the object and
not the action. For example, the mouthing with the former was “umbrella,” not “open,” and with the latter, it
was “drawer.”
Where the action itself was named through mouth-
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
ing while the verbal sign was being performed, it was
never by more than 6 out of 25 informants. Finally, the
word “open” was used to name (mouth) five separate
actions made with five different signs. It would therefore seem that, in the majority of cases of verbal
mouthing, the phenomenon is really a simultaneous
articulation of two elements: a verbal one manually and
a nominal one on the mouth. In other words, in the
elicited Auslan data, mouthing is strongly associated
with “nominalization,” even when co-occuring with a
verb.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition did not occur as frequently as might have
been expected from my preliminary observations
(1989b), and there were plenty of examples where
nominal and verbal signs had the expected archetypical
number of movements associated with each sign class
without any juxtaposition of both forms in the same
sentence. We can rule out the speculation that juxtaposition might be the most favored environment for these
sign forms to occur in, even in connected discourse.
However, though this proved not to be the case,
juxtaposition itself did tend to occur in one particular
environment. On examining the elicited data, I found
something unexpectedly distinctive about the immediate syntactic environment of a number of target verbs.
Namely, a significant percentage of verbs were juxtaposed within the elicited response immediately next to
their derivationally related noun (some 28% of target
verbs were juxtaposed with a related nominal form
whereas only 6% of target nouns were similarly juxtaposed). For example, the sign often glossed as OPENWINDOW is somewhat of a misnomer and actually
really means (following Table 3) something much more
general, such as “open/separate flat surfaced object(s)”
(which I gloss below as OPEN-FLAT). The meaning
of the sign is only fully specified by giving it a context:
1. WINDOW OPEN-FLAT : the window opened,
the open window, the window was opened.
2. TWO
#WOOD
CL:C-HORIZONTALSLATS OPEN-FLAT : the two wooden slats separated, etc.
I suggest that this pattern reflects the “weak” lexicalization of some of the Auslan target verbs used in
251
the TBAMS—if these target verbal forms were not
juxtaposed next to the strongly lexicalized nominal
form, it would actually be unclear to the interlocutor
what specific action was being referred to. By “lexically
weak,” I mean that the verbal sign may itself have a
general meaning, conveying little more than a signer of
Auslan would read into the conventionalized iconicity
of its component parameters, and thus read into the
conventionalized iconicity of the resulting sign complex as a whole, when the sign was performed alone or
out of context.
The distribution of juxtaposition across target
verbs was itself uneven. When individual target signs
were examined, the association of the phenomenon of
juxtaposition with individual target verbs rather than
nouns becomes much clearer (see Figure 6). Six target
verbs (CLOSE-WINDOW, PUT-ON-RING, FLICKLIGHTER, OPEN-UMBRELLA, OPEN-BOOK,
and PICK-UP-BAG) were juxtaposed with related
nominal signs by the majority of participants (but none
by more than 18 out of 25 informants). The remainder
of the juxtaposed target verbs were found with a minority of signers only: 3 signs (OPEN-CUPBOARD,
SHOOT-GUN, and OPEN-DOOR) had 10 or 9 tokens of juxtaposition, and 11 signs had fewer than 6
tokens, most with only 3, 2, or 1. Only one target verb
(TURN-KNOB) was not juxtaposed with a related
nominal sign by any participant.
The result in the latter case is less surprising if one
knows the context. Many signers did not recognize the
object in the stimulus film (it was an old-fashioned
stove) or did not know what the object being turned
was called in English (“a knob”). This is precisely the
reason why the nominal sign  received the lowest
score for mouthing—virtually none of the participants
knew what the object was called in English; and this is
also perhaps the reason why not one participant bothered with a juxtaposed nominalization in this environment. It would have added nothing more to an already
vague clause: “he turned the turn-thingummybob” is
no improvement on “he turned (something)” or “he
twisted his hand while holding (something).”
Juxtaposition of a nominal and a verbal form of a
noun-verb triad or pair in text thus seems a relatively
frequent phenomenon in Auslan, but a large corpus of
natural text is required to establish in which environments it is favored, and why.
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
Case 2: Data From the Auslan Lexical Database
In 1997, after all the data collected for the Auslan dictionaries had been entered into a computer database,
we could at last appreciate the number of noun-verb
pairs in the language, albeit with the qualification that
any statistical profile of the lexicon of Auslan must be
biased in favor of those signs and sign forms that have
been collected and entered into the database. Nonetheless, data on the number of noun signs and verb signs
that display the number of movements believed to indicate the inflectional and derivational morphology of
nouns and verbs in Auslan do provide a basis for comparison with data from the structured elicitation tasks
of the TBAMS and from observations made of ASL
(Launer, 1982; Supalla & Newport, 1978).
There are several databases of Auslan signs. The
largest database has approximately 8,000 records and
includes all known lexical signs, phonological variants,
regional signs (and their phonological variants), specialist and technical signs (including religious signs),
proper names (such as countries and Australian cities
and states), signs used in the Australasian Signed English system, recent loan signs (primarily from ASL),
general pseudo-lexicalized signs, archaic and obsolete
signs, and, finally, signs whose lexical status is doubtful
or undetermined. For the type of comparison sought
here, the smaller Auslan lexical database used in the
production of the Signs of Australia CD-ROM (Johnston, 1997), consisting of 3,962 entries, was consulted.
This database records core signs found in Auslan—it
does not include most phonological and regional variants, signs from the Australasian Signed English system, recent lexical borrowings or coinages (as often
found in teaching and educational interpreting situations), or general, archaic, obsolete, or doubtful signs
(see Johnston & Schembri [1999] for a detailed discussion of lexicalization in Auslan).
Case 2: Method
The database was searched to determine the number
and type of signs that, in their canonical or citation
form, required a repeated movement. In this way,
I hoped to see if there were indeed strong associations
of repeated movements with a particular sign class,
namely, nouns. One would expect this if the pattern
observed in some Auslan signs, as evidenced in the
TBAMS data, was the reflection of a system of inflectional and derivational noun-verb morphology in the
language. The number of signs in the Signs of Australia
database with repeated movements was compared to
the number of signs without repeated movements in a
number of categories.
Case 2: Results
First, I found that 20% of the total signs in the database were described as having a repeated movement.
When compared to the total number of signs marked
as verbs (2,738) and the total number of signs marked
as nouns (3,290), one sees that 545 (20%) of verbs displayed repetition, compared with 729 (22%) of nouns.
Neither category differed significantly from the other
or with the rate of repetition in citation signs across the
database (see Figure 9).
However, Auslan signs often do not belong to a
single sign class exclusively—many appear to function
as both nouns and verbs and are thus coded in the database as belonging to both parts of speech without any
apparent change in form. Indeed, 2,234 signs in the
database are coded as belonging to both the noun and
verb sign classes. Of these, 472 (21%) are described as
having a repeated movement pattern. Again, this percentage does not differ significantly from that of all
signs with a repeated movement in the database.
Signs that are exclusively nouns (1,056 tokens), exclusively verbs (504 tokens), and signs that are neither
nouns or verbs (adverbs, connectives, etc.) (168 tokens)
had slightly differing percentages of repeated movement in the citation form. In Figure 9, one can see that
the percentage of repeated forms in each of these
classes was 24% for “noun only,” and only 15% for
“verb only” and 14% for “neither.” Apparently, there
is some kind of association of repetition with nominals,
even if it is not pronounced.
Case 2: Discussion
It is always possible that in the design of the database,
in the collection of signs, in the consultation with informants, and, finally, in the transcription of signs
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
253
Figure 9 Percentage of types of signs that have repeated movement in the citation form as
recorded in the lexical database for the Auslan dictionary Signs of Australia.
themselves, differences in production when a given
sign functions as a noun as opposed to a verb, such as
repeated versus single movement, have not been coded
or even noticed. If the difference in movement parameter should be quite subtle, such as the quality of the
movement (restrained versus continuous) rather than
the number of movements (single versus repeated),
such omissions can be even more pronounced.
Only a tally of signs with repeated movement could
be made with respect to the Auslan lexical database.
The transcription of signs in the database did not consistently code for continuous or restrained movement,
so I was unable to search on this criteria and hence determine if the quality, rather than the number, of movements was strongly associated with citation nouns and
verbs. It thus remains a possibility that restrained
movement is, in fact, strongly associated with nominalization, but I am unable to show this due to the constraints of the database.
Returning to the relevant movement features coded
in the database, namely, repetition, one might expect
that the frequency of repeated form in signs marked as
exclusively nouns or verbs in the database might lead
to a clearer picture than comparisons with respect to
signs that can have more than one sign class membership. (If repetition as a nominalization morpheme were
a real and productive feature of the language, then
signs assigned exclusively to the nominal and verbal
parts of speech might be expected to show this most
clearly—nouns having more repeated forms than
verbs.)
As we saw, there was a slightly higher percentage of
noun signs that had a repeated movement pattern than
either verbs or other sign classes. The ratio of signs that
had a repeated movement to those that did not have a
repeated movement appeared to roughly approximate
1:5 in each of the possible sets of comparisons that were
made, except the “noun only” category. Here, the number of signs that function only as nouns and might be
said to use repetition “as a marker of their nominal status” was closer to 1:4 (24%).
However, the number of potential noun-verb pairs
in the database may be low (and hence the correlation
of single movement with verbs and repetition with
nouns may also be weak) because the verbal forms of a
given noun with repeated movement often appear to be
signs that are not lexicalized or are so general in meaning that they did not qualify for entry into the lexical
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
database. If this is true, the frequency of repetition entailing nominalization might not be quite as low as it
appears. Unfortunately, there is no data available at this
time to determine if this is indeed a factor in the distribution in the database. Overall, and with qualifications
understood, the comparison of signs from the lexical
database does not suggest that “repetition” alone is a
productive nominal derivational process in Auslan,
though it seems well established within the set of
highly mimetic signs with inherently reversible actions.
only one parameter, they were classified as similar or
related. If they differed in two or more parameters,
they were classified as different.
For the comparison of noun-verb pairs in the two
signed languages, the signs identified by Supalla and
Newport were located in a number of ASL dictionaries
or elicited from native ASL signers and compared to
their Auslan equivalents as signed by native Auslan
signers. They were categorized using the same criteria
as set out above.
Case 3: Data Comparing Noun-Verb Pairs and
Other Lexical Signs in Auslan and ASL
Case 3: Results
I suggested above in the discussion of the TBAMS data
that the putative inflectional and derivational morphology of nouns and verbs in Auslan, based on original
observations of ASL by Supalla and Newport (1978),
appears to be highly correlated with signs having an
underlying inherently reversible iconic movement. Supalla and Newport (1978) identified 100 noun-verb
pairs in ASL in which they claimed all the nominal
forms of the underlying signs displayed a repeated and
restrained movement. To test the suggestion that there
is an underlying “open and shut” iconicity in these
noun-verb pairs, I decided to compare the lexical overlap of this set of signs in Auslan and ASL with the lexical overlap between Auslan and ASL signs generally, as
I have estimated (in press).
Case 3: Method
The methods for the comparison of Auslan and ASL
signs generally are outlined in detail in Johnston (in
press). Briefly, the comparison shown here was
achieved by selecting each of the 1,600 signs from the
ASL Handshape Dictionary (Tennant & Brown, 1998)
and searching for a formationally and semantically
equivalent Auslan sign in the Auslan dictionaries
(Johnston, 1997, 1998). Signs were classified as “identical,” “similar or related,” or “different.” The basis of
discrimination of similarity and difference was on the
four major parameters of sign formation: handshape,
location, movement, and orientation. Facial and other
nonmanual features were disregarded. When all four
parameters were the same in both comparison signs,
they were treated as identical. If the signs differed in
I show (in press) that, overall, 31% to 34% of randomly selected signs between ASL and Auslan are
identical in form and meaning (with a further 8% to
13% being similar or related). For the 1,600 signs recorded in the ASL Handshape Dictionary (Tennant &
Brown, 1998), the figures were 31% identical and 7%
similar (see Figure 10). Ratios of the same order were
found when signs based on the Swadesh list of 100 basic concepts modified for use with sign languages
(Woodward, 1978) were compared. (Signs matching
glosses from the Swadesh list were identified and compared in both sign languages.)
In comparison, the 100 noun-verb pairs in Auslan
and ASL lexicons reveal a startling overlap. A massive
73% of the 100 underlying forms related to each of the
100 noun-verb pairs in ASL are also Auslan signs with
the same meaning. A further 14% of these signs are
similar—they may not be lexicalized in Auslan as they
may be in ASL, but in context could easily be used
with a similar meaning. In other words, 86% of the
signs are cognate. Only 13% of the noun-verb pairs
were lexically distinct in Auslan—the language having
no lexical sign for the concept and/or having a quite
different and unrelated sign. There is thus something
most unusual about the list of 100 ASL noun-verb
pairs. The dramatic increase in overlap between the
two languages in this list appears to be symptomatic of
the iconicity of these signs.
Case 3: Discussion
Within the set of 100 noun-verb pairs, 37% of the verbal members of the pairs have a repeated movement
themselves and thus must be distinguished from the
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
255
Figure 10 Percentage of shared signs between ASL and Auslan in three lexical sets.
nominal member of the pair through the quality of
movement alone—continuous or hold for the verb, restrained for the noun. Supalla and Newport claim that
in all of these pairs the nouns have a repeated and restrained movement. With respect to this set of signs,
then, there is a clear association of repetition with
nouns. The ratio of repeated nouns to repeated verbs
in the citation form is 3:1.
There is some recorded data using this set of 100
noun-verb pairs to elicit Auslan nouns and verbs. The
intuitions of native signers suggest that the majority of
the members of the list would be cited with the expected canonical nominal and verbal forms as predicted by Supalla and Newport for ASL. However, as
Launer (1982) also found for ASL, some of the listed
pairs are not strongly associated with any particular
sign forms (i.e., they are weakly lexicalized) and the responses are variable. For others, the responses were still
variable, even though a recognized lexical sign existed
for the concept.
If this marking for nominal and verbal signs is not
just a feature of this select list of highly mimetic signs
and has in fact become grammaticalized as a regular
morphological marker in the language, one would expect the ratio of “noun only” signs with a repeated
movement to “verb only” signs with a repeated movement to be of a similar order in the Auslan lexicon as a
whole. This appears to be only marginally so. As we
saw, only 24% of “noun only” signs have a repeated
movement compared to 15% of “verb only”—a ratio
of under 2:1. Moreover, if signer intuitions using the
list of 100 supposed noun-verb pairs are any reliable
indication, the pattern appears to weaken quickly beyond signs based on highly mimetic, inherently reversible actions.
In addition, the test elicitation set is itself a subset
of the list of 100 noun-verb pairs. All of the items in the
original ASL test battery were necessarily from pairs in
which the verb has a single movement and the noun
has a repeated movement in order to maximize the
difference between nominal and verbal forms. Of 20
noun-verb pairs, all but two pairs (FLY-IN-PLANE
and TAKE-OFF-ROCKET) were based on inherently
reversible actions in both languages. Precisely these
two signs (and, inexplicably, UMBRELLA) fell outside the expected pattern in the Auslan data.
Grammaticalization of Noun-Verb Marking
in Auslan
The data elicited through the TBAMS and presented
in this article confirm the existence of formationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a single movement and the noun displays a repeated movement. Although the TBAMS does elicit a
number of examples consistent with the notion that
256
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001
nominals within this paradigm are also constrained in
movement and verbs have a continuous or hold movement pattern, the quality, as well as the quantity, of
movements was not coded for in this study. Generally
speaking, however, it appears to be uncontroversial to
claim that most repeated movements result in a restrained movement quality.
Significantly, the data also suggest that these apparently derivationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan
are almost all exclusively part of a distinct set of iconic
(mimetic) signs archetypically based on inherently
reversible actions (such as opening and shutting).
Though it is common cross-linguistically that derivational processes are of restricted productivity, in Auslan
(and possibly by extension ASL), this derivational process is not highly productive or systematic and is also
overwhelmingly restricted in its application to this limited set of mimetic signs. I suggest that this “open and
shut” set of highly mimetic lexical signs is relatively
small (the Supalla and Newport list of 100 noun-verb
pairs may in fact be fairly exhaustive) and that the pattern of noun-verb pairing breaks down rapidly outside
this set of signs.
Moreover, even given the qualified existence of derivationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan, it is
questionable that the distinction or marking is regularly made in normal connected discourse. The initial
observations of the existence of noun-verb pairs in
ASL by Supalla and Newport were based on the production of citation signs, often in pairs. Native Auslan
signer intuitions, elicited data from the TBAMS, and
preliminary observation of recorded Auslan texts suggest that in normal connected discourse this marking
is often not made or is manifested with much more
variability than the citation lists would suggest. Launer
(1982, p. 210) makes a similar observation for ASL
noun-verb pairs. A highly selected set of ideal nounverb exemplars in ASL was shown to elicit accurate responses in only 67% of cases (Launer, 1982). The same
set, adapted for Auslan, yielded 68% of responses that
followed the expected pattern.
The fact that slightly more target nouns were accompanied by mouthing than displayed repeated
movement tends to suggest that the formational
difference observed when nouns and verbs are produced in their citation forms (and then often as part of
a juxtaposed pair) is not the only or primary way to
distinguish nouns from verbs in Auslan. Besides the
possible role of restrained movement (on which there
are no data at this stage), other possible strategies for
establishing the grammatical sign class, and thus function, of signs in context include the context of utterance and the co-text, sign order and syntax, nonmanual
features (e.g., facial adverbials that can only co-occur
with verbals), and, as just mentioned, the mouthing of
English words.
The differential marking of nominal and verbal
forms is also seen to occur often in environments of
“juxtaposition” (the two forms co-occuring in a phrase,
immediately next to each other). This juxtaposition appears to be related to the pseudo-lexical status of some
paired verbal signs. (As mentioned above, though repetition is strongly associated with many lexical nouns,
the paired single continuous movement form of these
signs, though verbal, is often not strongly lexicalized,
or lexicalized at all.)
Thus, there is an association between repeated
movement and nominal signs. Not surprisingly, it is
quite strong and marked within the set of signs that
have been identified on this very basis, but most of
these signs also share a fundamental “open and shut”
iconicity. The association appears to be quite weak
across the lexicon—there are far more signs in the lexical database in every category, including “nouns only,”
that do not have a repeated movement pattern.
Despite these observations, the data do show that
the putative derivational process is of limited productivity outside the iconic set, having spread to a number
of forms that appear to have no “open and shut” iconicity whatsoever. (However, examples are limited and
informants are much more likely to disagree on acceptability.) It even appears that in some cases the phonological feature that has been “transferred” from the
“open and shut” set to other signs is the restrained
movement pattern alone (the result of repeating a sign
rapidly), rather than the repetition itself. For example,
some noun-verb pairs in the language appear to be distinguished through quality of movement alone, without
repetition (PLANE and FLY-IN-PLANE, BOAT and
GO-IN-BOAT, COAT and PUT-ON-COAT). The
data collected from the TBAMS were not coded for the
distinction between nouns and verbs made on this basis
alone, so there are no data to support this speculation.
Grammatical sign class is intrinsically a syntactic
Nouns and Verbs in Auslan
concept; thus, the status of a derivational morphological process that purportedly changes the grammatical
sign class of a sign must be qualified if its best exemplars are actually one or two sign utterances, such as
in the listing of citation signs (alone or paired), or in
disambiguations and repairs (the signer is actually saying “FLY, NOT PLANE”). If, in addition, the manifestation of this process is highly variable in connected
discourse both in the language output of a single signer
and across a number of signers, all native signers, one
must be doubly cautious. Overall, it would seem the
derivational process is still very closely linked to an
iconic base, is incipient in the grammar of Auslan, and
is thus best described as only partially grammaticalized. The controlled elicited data from the TBAMS
will need to be complemented by analyses of a corpus
of naturalistic Auslan texts before a definitive answer
can be given on the linguistic status of this process in
the language. The status and role of noun/verb morphology, in Auslan at least, is far from being the open
and shut case that some sign language educators or
course books imply.
Received December 13, 2000; revision received February 28,
2001; accepted March 5, 2001
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