Aspect marking in Australian Sign Language: a process of gestural verb modification

This study provides a corpus-­‐based description of aspect marking by means of verb modification in Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Signed languages are widely reported to make use of a process of verb modification to express aspectual information. These modifications have been analysed as inflectional morphology by many researchers (Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Rathmann, 2005), while some have suggested they are derivational (Maroney, 2004) or even ideophonic morphology (Bergman & Dahl, 1994). In this dissertation, I describe the categories of aspectual verb modification (AVM) found in Auslan. I also suggest that AVM does not form a morphological system, but is more consistently understood as a system of gestural modification. This analysis makes AVM congruent with the other major verbal modification systems in signed languages, depicting and indicating verbs, and also points, all of which I consider partially-­‐lexical structures (Johnston & Schembri, 2007; Liddell, 2003; Schembri, 2001). The gestural nature of these systems provides evidence that signed languages make extensive use of gestural representation to convey core grammatical information. This finding is consistent with a model of language that integrates both the linguistic and gestural elements in human communication (Enfield, 2009).