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Friday, 5 JanuaryPlenary AddressCalifornia C12:30 – 1:30 PMPerson Inflection in Sign LanguagesCarol A. PaddenUniversity of California, San DiegoSign languages differ from spoken languages in the wealth and range of their articulators and the fact that these articulators move invisible space. At the same time, sign languages do not have special grammars; their grammatical categories and structures fall withinthe class of human languages. This interplay between modality and structure in sign languages offers some of the most interestingchallenges in linguistic analysis. One such challenge is an account of person inflection in sign languages. In sign languages such asAmerican Sign Language (ASL) and Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the body is the locus of first person inflection. Non-first-personinflection is any locus other than and away from the body. Conceptually, this denotes an embodied sense of first person, that it refersto the speaker or signer, and not the addressee and all other referents. Furthermore, many sign languages, including those unrelated toone another, show person inflection in the same class of verbs, those that denote transfer between the subject and the object. Notably,person inflection is typically absent for other classes of verbs, including those that reference locatives or refer to emotional orcognitive states. Recently, Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir, Wendy Sandler, and I have discovered that person inflection is absent entirely in anew sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). In this sign language, verbs of transfer are not distinct from otherclasses of verbs with respect to which inflections may appear; verbs of transfer lack person inflection of any kind, including firstperson.Using evidence from established sign languages as well as this case of a new sign language, I make several claims: (1)Despite the primacy and saliency of the human body, it is not universally available for first-person inflection. In the case of a newsign language with very little or no morphology, person inflection is not present. (2) Other grammatical structures exploit the body aslocus but are analytically distinct from person inflection, such as body as subject and body as a reference point for locatives. (3) Thedifferent ways in which sign languages exploit the human body offer us a unique perspective on the complex interplay between thepossibilities of modality and possible grammars.Carol Padden (PhD, University of California, San Diego, 1983) is professor of communication at the University of California, SanDiego, where she has taught since 1983. She has published on a variety of topics including verb morphology and syntax in ASL,foreign and native vocabulary in ASL, the acquisition of fingerspelling in very young signing children, sign language and deaf culture,and recently the emergence of syntax in a new sign language. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, theNational Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Spencer Foundation.66