The nature of bare nouns in American Sign Language

Speaker: 
Elena Koulidobrova (Central Connecticut State University)
Event time: 
Monday, October 15, 2018 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
LingSem (DOW 201) See map
370 Temple Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

In this talk, I examine the nature of bare nouns in American Sign Language. I show that ASL joins the list of languages that appear to have no countability distinction (like Yudja, Lima 2014): all nouns are able to combine with numerals. However, upon closer examination, this distinction is flushed out in partitioning context – with the application of a sortal classifier (Rothstein 2010, i.a.). This finding has a number of implications: for the syntax of the DP (MacLaughlin 1998, Bernath 2009) and for the syntax of the Classifier projection (Benedicto & Brentari 2004, Abner 2017, Davidson 2015).

203-432-2450
Event Type: 
Colloquia