The formation of Noun-Verb pairs in Taiwan Sign Language

• Main Authors: Pei-lan Wu, 吳佩蘭
• Other Authors: Hao-yi Tai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/00359491840388509305

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 語言所 === 96 === This thesis aims to investigate Noun-Verb pairs in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL). There are two issues in this thesis. One is to investigate the mechanism for the Noun-Verb pairs in TSL. The other one is to find out whether TSL is similar with American Sign Language (ASL) or not in that we distinguish the syntactic category by the signing frequency and movement. This thesis collects a large amount of concrete noun vocabulary. We investigate the mechanism for iconic vocabulary by classifying the various object properties they apply. We find the vocabulary expressing action property and manipulation property are the nouns in Noun-Verb pairs. Besides, we think that there is a tendency to the object properties that sign languages use to express the object concepts. The priority is manipulation property, action property, position property and appearance property. In this thesis, we find that most vocabularies obey this hypothesis in the studies of new words. In the second part of the research, we find that there is no distinctive difference between nouns and verbs in Noun-Verb pairs. In syntactic level, we decide the syntactic category by the syntactic position. In discourse level, mostly we may distinguish the syntactic category by the signing movement and location. Otherwise, we distinguish the syntactic category by context. This finding in Noun-Verb pairs in TSL is different from that in ASL.