Overview

This study, first published in 1988, examines cases of interaction of morphology and syntax in American Sign Language and proposes that clause structure and syntactic phenomena are not defined in terms of verb agreement or sign order, but in terms of grammatical relations. Using the framework of relational grammar developed by Perlmutter and Postal in which grammatical relations such as "subject", "direct object", etc. are taken as primitives of linguistic theory, facts about syntactic phenomena, including verb agreement and sign order are accounted for in a general way. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.