Phrase Structure of Brazilian Sign Language - Ronice.cce.prof.ufsc.br

Mary likes John and he does also.<br />
_____eg ___hn ____eg ___hn<br />
c) *aMARY bJOHN aAUXb [LIKE]i, JOHN TOO [e]I<br />
Mary likes John and he also.<br />
In LSB, ellipsis without an auxiliary is not allowed:<br />
__hn<br />
(33) a) *JOHN LIKE MARY, MARY TOO.<br />
John likes Mary and Mary also<br />
____eg ___hn<br />
b) bJOHN LIKE aMARY, aAUXb TOO<br />
John likes Mary and (she) does also.<br />
I have seen so far that plain verbs behave in the same way as main<br />
verbs in English. That is, following Lasnik’s proposal, these verbs are affixal and<br />
must merge with their respective affixes as a consequence of a phonological<br />
requirement under adjacency. I also observed in (18) that the affixal approach can<br />
not explain the lexical negation that takes place in sentences with inflecting verbs,<br />
which suggests the existence of an asymmetry. If I am on the right track, I must now<br />
explain how the structure works with inflecting verbs. Let us see if there is an<br />
analogy between inflecting verbs and the featural approach for verbal morphology<br />
presented by Lasnik (1995).<br />
The featural approach observed with auxiliaries in English and main<br />
verbs in French, as well as in Swedish, presents the following characteristics:<br />
(xxi) These verbs precede negation when they have “strong” features and follow<br />
negation when they have “weak” ones (the first case is observed in English<br />
and French: John has no idea about the game and Jean (n’)aime pas Marie;<br />
the second case is observed in Swedish, …, om hon inte ofta har sett<br />
honnom) 11 . This also is observed in LSB with agreement verbs (examples<br />
(34) and (35)):<br />
(34) ______________________neg/eg<br />
JOHNa NO aGIVEb BOOK MARYb.<br />
John did not give the book to Mary.<br />
(35) _______________neg/eg<br />
JOHNa NO bCARRY-BOXc.<br />
John did not carry the box (from here to there).<br />
(xxii) Verbs as have and be in English do not need do-support (John has no idea<br />
about the game results). Considering AUX in LSB as something similar to<br />
do-support the same distribution is observed (example (36)):<br />
11<br />
Glosses to French and Swedish examples respectively:<br />
John likes not Mary<br />
…, whether she not often has seen him<br />
11