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tive informants were used in the earliest descriptions ofAustralian Sign Language (Auslan) grammar and lexis(Johnston, 1987, 1989a, 1989b). Subsequent discussionof morphosyntax (transcription conventions, spatial“agreement,” and the chaining, embedding, and sub-ordination of clauses) was largely based on the closetranscription of natural signed texts (Johnston, 1991a,1991b, 1996). Schembri (1996) used additional originaldata, in conjunction with data already recorded in theAuslan dictionary, to describe word formation pro-cesses in the language. Apart from the language teach-ing materials produced by the National Institute forDeaf Studies at La Trobe University (Melbourne),there has been no other descriptive work on Auslangrammar in the past decade.

During this time, the only research toward describ-ing and recording the language has been lexicograph-ical. A second, completely revised edition of the Auslandictionary (Signs of Australia), was published in 1997.The elicited lexical data on Auslan are now recorded inthree dictionaries I have written or edited (1989b, 1997,1998). Though these data are peer reviewable, no otherAustralian sign language researchers have yet taken upthe challenge to contest, or contribute to, the lexicaldatabase of some 8,000 signs created from the data col-lected for these dictionaries.

More seriously, there have been no peer reviewableand replicable language elicitation procedures on anyaspects of Auslan grammar as described in earlier orpreliminary studies. No one had attempted to confirmor extend grammatical observations based on the elic-

Results of the noun-verb pair comprehension and productiontests from the Test Battery for Auslan Morphology and Syn-tax (Schembri et al., 2000) are re-presented, re-analyzed, andcompared to data from two other cases also dealing withnoun-verb pairs: the Auslan lexical database and a compari-son of Auslan and American Sign Language (ASL) signs.The data elicited through the test battery and presented inthis article confirm the existence of formationally relatednoun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a singlemovement and the noun displays a repeated movement. Thedata also suggest that the best exemplars of noun-verb pairsof this type in Auslan form a distinct set of iconic (mimetic)signs archetypically based on inherently reversible actions(such as opening and shutting). This strong iconic link per-haps explains why the derivational process appears to be oflimited productivity, though it does appear to have “spread”to a number of signs that appear to have no such iconicity.There appears to be considerable variability in the use of thederivational markings, particularly in connected discourse,even for signs of the “open and shut” variety. Overall, thederivational process is apparently still closely linked to aniconic base, is incipient in the grammar of Auslan, and is thusbest described as only partially grammaticalized.

Native signer intuitions, participant observation, ob-servation of video recordings of natural and spontane-ous signing, and elicitation of citation forms from na-

Research for this article was partially supported by the Australian Re-search Council and the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (Syd-ney, Australia) under a Strategic Partnerships with Industry—Researchand Training (SPIRT) grant awarded to Associate Professor Greg Leigh(Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children) and Professor Phil Foreman(University of Newcastle). Correspondence should be sent to TrevorJohnston, Renwick College, Faculty of Education, University of New-castle, Private Bag 29, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia (e-mail: [email protected]).

2001 Oxford University Press

Empirical Articles

Nouns and Verbs in Australian Sign Language: An Open and

Shut Case?

Trevor JohnstonRenwick College, University of Newcastle

itation of language in controlled situations. This articleis one of a series that has begun to address this problemby grounding grammatical observations of Auslangrammar in replicable or peer reviewable empirical data.

Inflectional and Derivational Morphology ofNouns and Verbs in Auslan

In Auslan, many lexical signs appear to function asnouns, verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech (i.e.,grammatical word class or, alternatively, grammaticalsign class). In particular, many signs may be used incontext as nouns or verbs without any apparent overtmorphological marking of grammatical sign class. Lex-ical semantics, the context of utterance, the co-text andthe immediate syntactic environment (the presence andco-occurrence of pronouns, adverbs, quantifiers, etc.)mean that ambiguity or lack of clarity is rarely aproblem.

Other lexical signs belong to only one grammaticalsign class. In particular, some signs can be used only asnouns or verbs, not both. Importantly, these signs alsodo not appear to carry any systematic morphologicalmarking of grammatical sign class membership.

In distinction to these two types of signs, someAuslan lexical signs appear to function as nouns andverbs and to carry a morphological marking whenfunctioning as a member of each grammatical signclass. The nominal and verbal signs appear to form apair that is derivationally or at least formationally re-lated. In these pairs of signs, nouns frequently displaya restrained movement pattern, whereas verbs are oftenperformed with a continuous movement. This observa-tion of Auslan nouns and verbs (Johnston, 1989b) wasprompted by, and based on reports of, the derivationaland inflectional morphology of nouns and verbs inAmerican Sign Language (ASL) (Supalla & Newport,1978).

According to Supalla and Newport (1978), thenominal form of the underlying sign in a derivationallyrelated noun-verb pair always displays a repeatedmovement in a restrained manner. Whereas the verbalform of the underlying sign could display either a singleor repeated movement, which may itself be either uni-directional or bidirectional, the manner of movementof verbs is always continuous or hold. Examination of

236 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 6:4 Fall 2001

Auslan fieldwork data (notebooks and video record-ings) revealed that a similar distinction between somenouns and verbs could be found in Auslan. This wassupported by native signer intuitions. Interviews andelicitation sessions with other native signers appearedto confirm the existence of noun-verb pairs in the lan-guage. Indeed, many of the pairs identified in Supallaand Newport (1978) were identical in both languages(see Case 3 below). The ASL researchers qualifiedtheir original observations by noting that this deriva-tional morphology for nouns and verbs in ASL wasmost consistently found with “concrete” entities andactions.

Though the pattern of restrained and repeatedmovement in nouns was also observed in Auslan, it wasunclear if nouns of this type regularly formed a pairwith a derivationally related verb having a continuousor hold movement. Moreover, textual data (video re-cordings) suggested that the marking of nouns andverbs in this way was not consistently made in con-nected discourse. On the other hand, the distinctiondid seem to be frequently made by informants duringelicitation sessions when they produced isolated cita-tion forms, or when participants produced a pair ofsigns (juxtaposing the noun with the verb) in responseto probes. In the latter case, the informant apparentlyintended to set up the two forms as a minimal pair tohighlight this very difference in form and meaning. Inlight of these observations, and despite identifying asimilar process in Auslan, I have cautioned that “thedistinction of nouns from verbs is not made as system-atically in Auslan as it appears to be in studies of ASL”(1989b, p. 226).

Case 1: Data From the Test Battery for AuslanMorphology and Syntax

The Test Battery for Auslan Morphology and Syntax(TBAMS)—a structured and replicable sign languagecomprehension and production elicitation test—wasprepared by researchers at Macquarie University andRenwick College (Schembri et al., 1997). It is an adap-tation of the Test Battery for American Sign LanguageMorphology and Syntax (Supalla et al., in press),which uses the comprehension, and proper produc-tion, of the nominal-verbal distinction as one of several

rameter between noun and verb pairs. Only noun-verbpairs in which the verbal form has a single unidirec-tional continuous or hold movement are part of theelicitation set in order to maximally distinguish themfrom nouns. Naturally, according to the description ofderivational process in ASL, (and, presumably, Aus-lan), if these signs are members of noun-verb pairs inthe language, the nominal form will always display arepeated and restrained movement.

A repeated movement—one of the indicators ofnominalization in this context—is far easier for a re-searcher to observe and record than is a restrainedmovement, as Launer (1982) also observed. Conse-quently, in this first analysis of the data elicited throughthe TBAMS, nouns are coded only for the presence orabsence of a repeated movement. Because the data havenot been coded for continuous or restrained move-ment, I am unable to show if the quality, rather thanthe number, of movements is also strongly associatedwith nouns in noun-verb pairs. Noun and verb signselicited in the test may, in fact, also be consistently dis-tinguished by the quality rather than (or not just onlyby) the number of movements. Indeed, I assume this tobe the case, even though I am actually unable to showit from the data, as yet.

Case 1: Method

The aim and design of these tasks have been describedfully in Schembri et al. (in press). Briefly, the taskswere designed to elicit responses to stimuli that couldbe coded, quantified, and compared across partici-pants. The participants were all adult native signers ofAuslan—14 from Sydney, 8 from Melbourne, 3 fromelsewhere. In the first task, they were required to pro-duce sentences or phrases that elicited specific nounsand verbs, and, in a second task, to identify target signsproduced by a filmed sign model as either nouns orverbs by selecting one of several pictures depicting ob-jects or actions.

The aim of the first (production) task was to deter-mine whether differences in the number of movementsoccurred in a selection of Auslan signs that appeared toform noun-verb pairs as described in the literature andwere predicted from consultation with native signers.Signed responses were elicited from each participant

Nouns and Verbs in Auslan 237

indicators of proficiency in ASL. Importantly, the ASLtest battery is careful to select nouns and verbs thatmay be considered “concrete” and thus highly likely todisplay the pattern.

Unlike the ASL test battery, TBAMS was intendedas a means of collecting data on Auslan and not to testfor levels of proficiency. The ASL test battery was de-signed to elicit from participants responses that re-quired the use or comprehension of a range of knownmorphological and syntactic features of the language.Though Auslan has been described as similarly dis-playing nearly all of these features (Johnston, 1989b),there have been no structured, controlled, and repli-cable elicitation sessions to confirm this empirically.The TBAMS was intended as the first step in confir-mation.

Interestingly, as Launer (1982) pointed out, nosource was given for the data in the original identifica-tion of noun-verb pairs and in the description of thisderivational process in ASL (Supalla & Newport,1978). Her doctoral dissertation, a study of the acquisi-tion of this derivational process by ASL-using chil-dren, includes a small assessment of the presence andproductivity of the process in data elicited from adultnative signers of ASL (not more than 10 participants).This study appears to be the only one available in theliterature and may even be the only one ever con-ducted.

The TBAMS has been administered only to adultnative signers with the intention of confirming that na-tive signers do, in fact, display these morphological andsyntactic features as part of their normal language pro-duction in Auslan. Schembri et al. (in press) have re-ported on some preliminary results from the applica-tion of the TBAMS to adult native signers in Sydneyand Melbourne.

In this article, I wish to focus on only two of thetests in the battery, both dealing with noun and verbmorphology: the noun-verb production test (NVP) andthe noun-verb comprehension test (NVC). Until thedata were collected as part of the TBAMS, there wassimply no way of knowing how extensive and system-atic noun and verb pairs were in the language.

With respect to noun and verb morphology, theASL test battery (and, consequently, the TBAMS) wasdesigned to test for modification of the movement pa-

after each of 30 filmed skits. After watching each skit,the participant was asked to describe what had hap-pened. Each skit was designed to elicit one or two tar-get nouns or verbs, which were assumed to be membersof 20 noun-verb pairs (see Table 1). Overall, there were40 target nouns and verbs. The participants’ responseswere videotaped for later analysis.

The aim of the second (comprehension) test was todetermine if native signers interpreted differences inthe number of movements in these target signs as sig-nalling a morphological distinction between deriva-tionally related nouns and verbs in Auslan. Each signwas produced in isolation in a short film clip, and noother morpho-syntactic cues were provided. The par-ticipant was asked to select, after watching each clip,one of two pictures that best illustrated the meaning ofthe observed sign. There was a separate page of illus-trations for each sign performed. One illustration de-picted an action (such as “shooting a gun”), and theother an illustration depicted an object (such as a gun).In other words, participants simply had to identify thestimulus sign as a noun or a verb.

Informal consultation with native signers sug-gested that at least 14 of the 20 target noun-verb pairsfrom the ASL test battery also appeared to exhibit a


similar morphological distinction in Auslan. A furthertwo were possible candidates, and four were notthought to exhibit the pattern or realized this distinc-tion differently. Thus, part of the aim of the tests was toassess the accuracy of these intuitions and judgments.

Case 1: Results

I will present the data on noun-verb morphology intwo ways—first, with the target nouns and verbs con-sidered simply as two sign classes and, second, withtarget nouns and target verbs considered individually.In the first presentation, I give percentages of the num-ber of tokens of target nouns and verbs produced inresponse to, or correctly identified from, the stimulusfilm. In the second presentation, I give the number andpercentage of signers who correctly produced, or cor-rectly identified, each target noun and verb individ-ually.

The Noun-Verb Production Task

The results of the NVP test can be understood in sev-eral different ways according to what sign forms aretypically produced by native signers for nouns and

Table 1 Target noun-verb pairs in the noun-verb production (NVP) test of the TBAMS

Native signer intuitionsTarget noun Target verb on n-v pairing

PLANE FLY-IN-PLANE No/doubtfulBOOK OPEN-BOOK YesBAG PICK-UP-BAG YesCUPBOARD OPEN-CUPBOARD YesCAMERA TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH YesCHAIR SIT Doubtful/yesDOOR OPEN-DOOR YesDOORBELL PRESS-DOORBELL YesKNOB TURN-KNOB YesDRAWER OPEN-DRAWER YesGUN SHOOT-GUN YesHEADPHONES PUT-ON-HEADPHONES NoKEY TURN-KEY YesLIGHTER FLICK-LIGHTER YesPLUG PLUG-IN NoRING PUT-ON-RING YesROCKET TAKE-OFF-ROCKET NoSCISSORS CUT-WITH-SCISSORS YesUMBRELLA OPEN-UMBRELLA DoubtfulWINDOW CLOSE-WINDOW Yes

eight adult native ASL signers tested, she found that67% of overall responses were accurate.)

In addition, as the table shows, other forms besidesthe target were sometimes produced in response to thestimulus film. These included fingerspelling, failure touse an appropriate target sign verb or noun (i.e., notproducing a verb or noun as expected by either not re-ferring to a participant or process at all, or using a gen-eral sign such as “thing”), or using a sign unrelated tothe noun-verb pairs focused on (e.g., producing an ap-propriate verb but one that had no related nominalform, or vice versa). In a few other cases, the form ofthe sign in question could not be deciphered.

Figure 2 shows this same data while identifying theindividual nouns and verbs themselves. Of the 20 targetnominal items, the results show that only two of thetarget nouns are produced by all participants with a re-peated movement (DOOR, LIGHTER).

Of the remaining target nominal items, a further11 were produced by the majority of participants witha repeated, restrained movement (BAG, BOOK,DRAWER, KEY, SCISSORS, CAMERA, WINDOW,GUN, CUPBOARD, KNOB, RING). One targetnoun (CHAIR) was made with a repeated movementby just six participants, and a further five target nouns(DOORBELL, PLUG, ROCKET, HEADPHONES,PLANE) rarely exhibit a repeated movement (less thanfive participants produced this form in each case). Onetarget noun (UMBRELLA) was not produced with arepeated movement by any participant.


verbs. The first includes movement repetition, as pre-dicted by and specifically coded for in the test. Thesecond applies only to the elicited responses in the pro-duction test. It involves two other possible alternativestrategies for marking or distinguishing nouns andverbs in Auslan that emerged from further examinationof the elicited data—mouthing and juxtaposition. Idiscuss each of these three strategies in turn. Ofcourse, there are other ways that Auslan—or any lan-guage—may mark or distinguish nouns and verbs (e.g.,through context, lexis, or sign order and syntax); how-ever, this study does not address this issue.

Repeated movement versus single movement. Given the na-ture of the elicitation test and the nature of the codinginstructions for responses, one can first compare theform of all target nouns and verbs with respect to re-peated and single movements. Figure 1 shows the num-ber of participants who responded using a sign with arepeated movement when the target sign was a nounand a single movement when the target sign was a verb.

More than 57% of target nouns did indeed displaya repeated movement pattern, and more than 79% oftarget verbs involved a single movement. Only 6% oftarget verbs displayed a repeated movement pattern.However, significant numbers of target nouns (25%)also displayed a single movement pattern. In terms ofthe original ASL test battery, therefore, approximately68% of overall responses were as expected. (This resultis almost identical to that of Launer [1982, p. 97]—of

Figure 1 Elicited form of noun and verb targets.

All 20 of the target verbs were produced with asingle, continuous movement by at least six of the par-ticipants. Whereas only two target verbs (OPEN-UMBRELLA and PUT-ON-HEADPHONES) hada single continuous movement produced by all 25 par-ticipants, 11 other verbs (PRESS-DOORBELL,PUT-ON-RING, CLOSE-WINDOW, OPEN-CUP-BOARD, PLUG-IN, OPEN-DOOR, PICK-UP-BAG,FLY-IN-PLANE, SIT, and TAKE-OFF-ROCKET)were realized by signs with a single continuous move-ment by all signers, if both target and unrelated formsare included in one group. Only the seven remain-ing verbs (CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, TURN-KEY,OPEN-DRAWER, TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH, FLICK-LIGHTER, SHOOT-GUN, and TURN-KNOB) werenot consistently performed with single continuousmovements by all informants. Of these, five verbs(CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, TURN-KEY, OPEN-DRAWER, TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH, and FLICK-LIGHTER) were realized with single continuousmovements by 22 or more participants. In other words,only two signs (SHOOT-GUN and TURN-KNOB)were complete outliers, produced by a significant num-ber of participants with a repeated movement.

Mouthing. In the transcription and coding of the mate-rial elicited through the TBAMS, the mouthing of En-glish words was frequent and apparently favored with


target nouns (see also Schembri et al., 2000). Subse-quent analysis of the data, scoring for the presence orabsence of mouthing with nouns and verbs producedin response to the stimulus film clip—whether the tar-get sign or some other noun sign produced in lieu ofthe target—revealed that this correlation of mouthingwith nouns was real and pronounced.

As Figure 3 shows, more than 316 (69.6%) of thesigned noun responses were accompanied by a clearlymouthed English word, whereas only 64 (13.1%) of thesigned verb responses were also accompanied by themouthing of an English word. The English word thatwas mouthed was almost always the English wordfound in the gloss, with only a few exceptions (e.g.,“pistol” is mouthed by two signers instead of “gun”).

Figure 4 presents the data for each target sign indi-vidually. One target noun (BAG) was accompanied by amouthing by 24 participants. A further 11 target nouns(DOOR, KEY, CAMERA, CHAIR, GUN, PLANE,UMBRELLA, BOOK, RING, LIGHTER, and WIN-DOW) were mouthed by at least 18 test participants.With the inclusion of DRAWER, CUPBOARD, andROCKET, mouthed by just over half of all participants,16 of 20 target nouns were mouthed by the majorityof signers.

Five of the 20 target nouns appear to be exceptions:SCISSORS, PLUG, DOORBELL, HEADPHONES,and KNOB. From the videotape record, it appears that

Figure 2 Elicited form of individual target nouns and verbs (nouns in lower case, verbs in upper case).

PRESS-DOORBELL, FLICK-LIGHTER, PICK-UP-BAG, PUT-ON-HEADPHONES, SHOOT-GUN, and TAKE-OFF-ROCKET) were accompaniedby mouthing by fewer than four informants. Of theseven target verbs with a higher frequency of mouth-ing, none was mouthed by more than 12 participants.

Juxtaposition. The second additional feature observedin the data related to the juxtaposition of nominal andverbal forms in a signed response. I have suggestedelsewhere that the putative distinction between nomi-nal and verbal forms in Auslan was often best observedwhen informants juxtaposed the two forms as a mini-mal pair (Johnston, 1989b), rather than being a distinc-tion regularly made or observed in connected dis-course. This phenomenon seemed to be manifested inthe research for this article and, one assumes, in thenative signer reflections that informed Supalla andNewport (1978). When going through the list of 100noun-verb pairs (and, especially, the subset of 20 cho-sen for the test battery), native signers who understandthe grammatical distinction between nouns and verbshad little problem producing two distinct sign forms—a nominal one and a verbal one—for the majority ofthe listed items. The two forms were juxtaposed as aminimal pair, which undoubtedly highlighted theirphonological differences.

However, I observed that juxtaposition frequently


three of these signs (PLUG, HEADPHONES, andKNOB) were essentially “nameless” (in English) formost of the participants. They appeared not to knowwhat the objects in question were called in English,even though they had no problem producing a sign foreach of them that was perfectly clear in context. (Theseparticipants are recorded on the video record askingthe tester what the object was that they had just seen.To avoid giving the participants a leading answer—byusing the target sign—the tester simply fingerspelledthe English word.) One object in the elicitation video,a doorbell, was not immediately recognized as such bymany of the participants. This may explain why onlyonly two participants mouthed DOORBELL. Finally,only only 12 participants mouthed SCISSORS, a com-mon lexicalized sign. There appears to be no ready ex-planation for this. If we disregard three of these prob-lematic signs (PLUG, HEADPHONES, and KNOB)in our assessment of mouthing, then the overwhelmingmajority of noun responses was accompanied bymouthing.

Target verbs were mouthed in only a minority ofcases. Indeed, more than a quarter of informants didnot mouth a single target verb. Two target verbs(TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH and TURN-KNOB) werenot mouthed by any signers, and a further 11 targetverbs (FLY-IN-PLANE, CLOSE-WINDOW, PUT-ON-RING, CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, PLUG-IN,

Figure 3 Mouthing of noun and verb responses.

occurred in naturalistic data (the nominal and verbalforms of a noun-verb pair co-occurred in a phrase, im-mediately next to each other). That is, juxtaposition it-self was a common and frequent environment for ob-serving clearly articulated nominal and verbal forms,


rather than the individual forms occurring alone in aclause with appropriate modification for grammaticalsign class. I suspected that the weakness of the patterncould partially explain this—the juxtaposition wasneeded to specify or disambiguate the action. The elic-

Figure 4 Number of mouthings for each individual target sign (nouns in lower case,verbs in upper case).

ment associated with verbals was much more consis-tent than in the production test (see Figure 7).

More than 90.4% (226) of all stimulus verbs wereidentified as verbs, and more than 67.6% (169) of allstimulus nouns were identified as nouns. Of overall re-sponses from the 25 participants, therefore, approxi-mately 79% were as expected. (This compares with96% accurate identifications by eight adult native sign-ers of ASL as reported in Launer [1982, p. 97].) A fewstimulus signs were identified as either or both nounsand verbs. As Figure 8 makes clear, one sign (UM-BRELLA) accounts for most of the cases when a stim-ulus sign was assigned equally to nominal and verbalstatus.

Of the 20 target signs in Figure 8, 12 appeared tobe quite consistently interpreted as either nouns(BAG, GUN, LIGHTER, WINDOW) or verbs(OPEN-DRAWER, FLY-IN-PLANE, CUT-WITH-SCISSORS, TURN-KEY, PUT-ON-HEAD-PHONES, OPEN-DOOR, TAKE-PHOTO, PLUG-IN) by almost all of the participants. For an additionalfour items (PUT-ON-RING, OPEN-BOOK, CUP-BOARD, ROCKET), a majority of participants re-sponded in the expected way, but a substantial minorityresponded differently. For the remaining four items(KNOB, DOORBELL, CHAIR, UMBRELLA), theresponses were mixed.


ited responses were thus coded for instances of juxta-position to see if this was indeed a marked pattern.

Juxtaposition was not equally distributed acrosstarget nouns and verbs. As Figure 5 shows, of the targetverbs, 28% were juxtaposed with the nominal form,while only 6% of the target nouns were in environmentswhere they were juxtaposed with the verbal form.

As Figure 6 shows, the distribution of juxtapositionacross target verbs themselves was also uneven. Sixtarget verbs (CLOSE-WINDOW, PUT-ON-RING,FLICK-LIGHTER, OPEN-UMBRELLA, OPEN-BOOK, and PICK-UP-BAG) were juxtaposed with re-lated nominal signs by the majority of participants (butnone by more than 18 out of 25 potential informants).The remainder of the juxtaposed target verbs wasfound with a minority of signers only: 3 signs (OPEN-CUPBOARD, SHOOT-GUN, and OPEN-DOOR)had 10 or 9 tokens of juxtaposition, and 11 signs hadless than 6 tokens, most with only 3, 2, or 1. One targetverb (TURN-KNOB) was not juxtaposed with a re-lated nominal sign by any participant.

The Noun-Verb Comprehension Task

In terms of the comprehension of and response to asigned stimulus, the expected pattern of repeatedmovement associated with nominals and single move-

Figure 5 Percentage target nouns and verbs that occur juxtaposed with the correspondingnominal or verbal form of the sign in the same clause.

Case 1: Discussion

Number (and Quality) of Movements

Though the NVP task appears to successfully elicit anumber of target noun-verb pairs from Auslan signers,only a few nominal signs were consistently markedwith a repeated movement by the overwhelming major-


ity of participants. Table 2 summarizes the NVP andNVC results.

As reported in Schembri et al. (2000), repeatedmovement was not used by most of the participants fora number of target nouns: CHAIR, DOORBELL,PLUG, ROCKET, HEADPHONES, PLANE, andUMBRELLA. CHAIR and PLUG had variant forms

Figure 6 Number of elicited response clauses in which the target sign is juxtaposed with thecorresponding nominal or verbal form of the sign in the same clause (nouns in lower case, verbsin upper case).

With respect to target verbs, several (TAKE-OFF-ROCKET, SIT, and FLY-IN-PLANE) did not alwaysappear in the expected forms, but still displayed asingle movement pattern. They either used alternativehandshapes (e.g., the middle-finger hand instead of theindex-finger hand for TAKE-OFF-ROCKET), usedanother lexical sign (SIT), or portrayed the situationdifferently due to considerations of scale and perspec-tive (FLY-IN-PLANE). In the latter case, for example,many singers used a proform “classifier” (the indexfinger) to represent the referent and its movement (theobject in the stimulus film was a small model plane).

Unexpectedly, four target verbs appeared to exhibita repeated movement (TURN-KNOB, SHOOT-GUN, FLICK-LIGHTER, and TAKE-PHOTO-GRAPH). Though the number of repeated tokens wasquite low for two of these target verbs (3 for bothFLICK-LIGHTER and TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH), itwas considerably higher for the other two (TURN-KNOB and SHOOT-GUN), with 12 and 9 tokens, re-spectively.

These four signs may represent (1) target verbs thathad a repeated movement in their citation form forsome of the test participants (this appears unlikely), (2)target verbs modified for interative aspect (there isnothing in the stimulus film that would appear toprompt this interpretation of the action and this ap-pears unlikely), or (3) not verbs at all but, rather, nomi-nal signs that name the action without any reference to


strongly associated individually with nominal and ver-bal meanings even if, for some signers, noun-verb pairsdo exist with each of these variants. Consequently,many signers used one form of PLUG with a “three”handshape (ASL “six” handshape) as a nominal andanother form with a “bent-L” handshape as the verbalform. Similarly, there were at least five different formsof CHAIR. In the data, some of the forms werestrongly associated with a nominal meaning but hadonly one single movement. It was concluded that theuse of these variants might be one reason why thesetwo signs, at least, scored so poorly as forms with a re-peated movement.

Other target nouns in this low-scoring group in-cluded DOORBELL, ROCKET, and PLANE. Thefirst two objects were not immediately recognizedwhen seen in the stimulus film by many participants,and many used a descriptive phrase rather than a lexi-cal sign. With respect to DOORBELL, had the door-bell been recognized as such, then one can assumemany more signers would have used a lexical sign thatwould have included a repeated movement. Finally, thelast two target nouns in this group (ROCKET andPLANE) appeared not to have nominal forms thatwere distinguishable for the verbal forms (TAKE-OFF-ROCKET and FLY-IN-PLANE) by way of rep-etition. This was contrary to the expectation in theASL data but somewhat in line with native signer intu-itions for Auslan (as shown in Table 2).

Figure 7 Identification of stimulus nouns and verbs.

an agent or an object, much as a gerund in English (thisseems plausible).

In other words, these responses could be seen ascontaining nonfinite clauses or circumstantial adjuncts.Thus, instead of signing something like sentence 1, be-low, as the expected response, the TBAMS partici-pants produced something like sentences 2 or 3, whichmay be easily, and mistakenly, confused with 4.

1. There’s an egg in an egg carton and someoneshoots at it with a water pistol.


2. There’s an egg in an egg carton, with shooting(of a water pistol) (going on).

3. There’s an egg in an egg carton and there’sshooting at it (with a water pistol) (by someone).

4. There’s an egg in an egg carton and someone isshooting at it with a water pistol.

In this way, these “exceptions” may prove to be tokensof nouns that actually do display a repeated movement,as expected.

With the comprehension test data, some of the un-

Figure 8 Identification of individual stimulus nouns and verbs (nouns in lower case, verbsin upper case).

mean the object, not the action, because the handshapewould have been modified to incorporate informationabout the size of the book being opened if the actionwere the intended meaning.

Overall, 57% of target nouns were produced witha repeated movement and approximately 79% of targetverbs were made with a single movement; 90% of stim-ulus verbs were identified as verbs, and 67% of stimu-lus nouns were identified as nouns. Though cross-linguistically, derivational processes commonly are ofrestricted productivity, unlike inflectional processes,which are more parsimonious, the results, one maypresume, are somewhat less than one would expect,given that the original ASL examples were chosen spe-cifically as good exemplars of this pattern in that lan-guage. In the majority of cases, native Auslan signersconsulted about the list of items had agreed that theexamples fit the pattern.

As shown in Table 2, some of the target signs ap-peared to represent poor examples of potential noun-


expected responses appear to reflect the patterns of lex-ical variation in Auslan noun-verb pairs discussed ear-lier (e.g., PUT-ON-RING, CUPBOARD, ROCKET,CHAIR, PLUG-IN), whereas others appear to reflectdifficulties in interpreting what was being depicted inthe illustrations (e.g., the picture intended to depict theobject “plane” was interpreted by many participants asthe action “plane landing”). Others appear to reflect thefact that some signs, inexplicably, simply did not con-firm to the expected pattern (e.g., UMBRELLA). Thesuggested reasons for the mixed responses in some othercases (e.g., KNOB, DOORBELL) have been given above.

Finally, as also observed in Schembri et al. (2000),some signers reported that other factors played a partin some responses. For example, some participants ig-nored what they would normally interpret as a verbalsign (OPEN-BOOK), instead interpreting it as a nomi-nal sign (BOOK), because the picture depicting theverbal meaning showed a thick book being opened.They reasoned that the signer in the stimulus film must

Table 2 Target noun-verb pairs in the TBAMS

Outcome: Outcome:Production Comprehension

Nouns Verbs NounsNoun Verb Reversible? Expectation (repeated) (single) as nouns Verbs as verbs

PLANE FLY-IN-PLANE No No 4% 64% NA 100%BOOK OPEN-BOOK Yes Yes 92% 80% NA 72%BAG PICK-UP-BAG Yes Yes 96% 84% 100% NACUPBOARD OPEN-CUPBOARD Yes Yes 60% 92% 76% NACAMERA TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH Yes Yes 92% 84% NA 96%CHAIR SIT No Doubtful 24% 32% 32% NADOOR OPEN-DOOR Yes Yes 100% 88% NA 100%DOORBELL PRESS-DOORBELL Yes Yes 12% 96% 60% NAKNOB TURN-KNOB Yes Yes 56% 48% 60% NADRAWER OPEN-DRAWER Yes Yes 92% 88% NA 96%GUN SHOOT-GUN Yes Yes 72% 64% 100% NAHEADPHONES PUT-ON-HEAD No No 8% 100% NA 88%KEY TURN-KEY Yes Yes 92% 92% NA 88%LIGHTER FLICK-LIGHTER Yes Yes 100% 76% 88% NAPLUG PLUG-IN Yes No 8% 92% NA 92%RING PUT-ON-RING Yes Yes 52% 96% NA 72%ROCKET TAKE-OFF-ROCKET No No 8% 24% 20% NASCISSORS CUT-WITH-SCISSORS Yes Yes 92% 96% NA 100%UMBRELLA OPEN-UMBRELLA Yes Doubtful 0% 100% 48% NAWINDOW CLOSE-WINDOW Yes Yes 84% 92% 92% NA

57% 79% 67% 90%

NA � not applicable.In the comprehension task, only a nominal or verbal sign from each of the 20 noun-verb pairs was used. Therefore, for eachnoun-verb pair, one cell, “target noun” or “target verb,” is marked NA.

verb pairs in Auslan, and this was confirmed by the re-sults of the TBAMS. One could argue that, had other,better exemplars been chosen, the percentage of nounsand verbs with the expected movement patterns couldwell have been higher, creating the impression of a sys-tematic grammaticalized morphological process. Notsurprisingly, if we were to remove some of the prob-lematic examples from the list of noun-verb pairs andsubstitute noun-verb pairs that display much less var-iation, then the association of repeated forms withnominalization would appear much stronger and sys-tematic. (This should only be expected if test items arebeing selected on this very basis—as a way of testingproficiency—but somewhat misleading if we are usingthe items to collect data to establish the existence ofderivational morphology.)

However, as I explain in the next section, an exami-nation the best exemplars of noun-verb pairs in the twotests not only tells us which additional potential noun-verb pairs would be suitable for inclusion in an im-proved version of the test, it also indicates both thelimits of the test itself and, significantly, the possiblelimits of noun-verb pairing in Auslan.

Iconicity and the Number of Movements in Noun-Verb Pairs

On examination, it becomes evident that most of thesigns in the elicitation set have an underlying iconicityin which an inherent reversibility in the action moti-vates this iconicity. This reversibility typically involvesa movement in one of two directions such as open-ing or shutting, turning clockwise or anti-clockwise,pulling out or pushing in, and, marginally, putting onor taking off. Signs of this type in the elicitationset include OPEN-BOOK, PICK-UP-BAG, OPEN-CUPBOARD, OPEN-DOOR, TURN-KNOB,OPEN-DRAWER, TURN-KEY, PLUG-IN, PUT-ON-RING, OPEN-UMBRELLA, and CLOSE-WINDOW).

I would suggest that it is this that really lies behindthe observation by Supalla and Newport (1978) that“concrete” signs are the best exemplars of noun-verbderivational morphology. The signs themselves do notrepresent concrete entities and actions; rather, theunderlying iconicity of the signs is concrete (essentially


a reversible action). It would appear that in a sign withthis type of underlying iconicity, a single movement ineither of one of the two possible directions is inter-preted as that action as a process (i.e., a verb); and that a(restrained) repetition of the movement in this type ofsign appears to name or refer to a salient participant inthat process (i.e., a noun) or the process as a participant (i.e.,a noun/gerund).

A small subset of these concrete actions involve akind of pushing or pulling that might be best describedas actions that engage or disengage a mechanism. Thereversibility in these signs is less evident because theaction is effective only in one direction, or the mecha-nism in question usually returns to the disengaged po-sition when the action is stopped (e.g., pulling a triggeron a gun, flicking a lighter, pressing a button, operatinga pair of scissors). The signer, though, is forced to re-verse the movement in order to perform another actionof the same type. Examples from the elicitation setinclude TAKE-PHOTOGRAPH, PRESS-DOOR-BELL, SHOOT-GUN, FLICK-LIGHTER, andCUT-WITH-SCISSORS.

The few noun signs in the test battery that fail tofollow the pattern, and whose lack of repetition cannotbe accounted for by some other factor (e.g., by the fail-ure to recognize the object and produce the appropriatelexical noun, like DOORBELL), do not appear to havean inherent reversible movement of this type, with thesingle exception of UMBRELLA. The signs includeCHAIR, ROCKET, HEADPHONES, and PLANE.The movement in each appears (1) to have no iconicvalue as a movement (CHAIR), (2) to not be normallyreversible (ROCKET, PLANE), or (3) to be simply notsalient for many signers (HEADPHONES).

Thus, where a clearly iconic reversible or disengag-ing movement is not present, the putative derivationalprocess involving repetition appears to be far from sys-tematic, and somewhat haphazard. Though the per-centages of accurate or expected responses involvingsign production from both ASL and Auslan signerswere similar indeed (67% vs. 68%), Launer (1982)does not indicate by gloss which signs, if any, were lesslikely to be given the canonical noun or verb marking.I am thus unable to say if variable responses were alsomore likely with ASL signs that did not have a highlymimetic inherently reversible movement.

In their original description of noun-verb pairs inASL, Supalla and Newport (1978) did suggest that theterm noun-verb pairs was somewhat of an oversimpli-fication. Each nominal sign was actually linked to a“family” of verb signs, not a single verb sign. However,in their description of this family of verb signs, nomention is made of the inherent reversibility of the mi-metic action in the iconic base of the signs in question.Instead, they refer to the existence of numerous modi-fied forms of a verbal sign that are all equally “paired”with the nominal. They give the example of the noun-verb pair LAWNMOWER/MOW. Its “family ofverbs,” according to Supalla and Newport, includes notonly MOW but also GIVE-THE-LAWNMOWER-A-PUSH, MOW-IN-A-FIGURE-8, MOW-IN-A-CIRCLE, MOW-UP-AND-DOWN-SMALL-BUMPY-HILLS, and so forth. This is not what I amsuggesting here.

Table 3 lists examples of each kind of these revers-ible concrete signs, with glosses. The nominal sign(representing the name of the action in question suchas window-opening, tap-turning, etc., or the name ofan object closely associated with the action such as win-dow, tap, etc.) has a rapidly repeated movement. The


Furthermore, from the best exemplars of the pat-tern in the TBAMS data presented in Table 2, it wouldseem that most of the archetypical noun-verb “pairs”in which the nominal sign displays a repeated move-ment and the verbal sign displays a single movementare actually noun-verb triads. In each of these triads,there are two verbal signs that each consist of one of thedirectionally opposed movements of a concrete action.(Incidentally, recognition of these noun-verb triadsseems to exist in the ASL teaching literature. In SigningNaturally [Lentz, 1988], a course book for teachers andstudents of ASL, some of the first noun-verb pairs stu-dents are introduced to are actually listed as triads [e.g.,DOOR, OPEN-DOOR, CLOSE-DOOR, WINDOW,OPEN-WINDOW, CLOSE-WINDOW]).

Often the verbal sign is weakly lexicalized or has ageneral meaning. The third element of the triad is therelated nominal sign, which displays a repeated move-ment in one of these directions or a full cycle of the twodirections—at least one movement in one directionand at least one movement in the other. It is not un-usual for a nominal of this sort to do one and a halfcycles (i.e., it has at least three beats). Nominals of thistype appear to be fairly stable lexemes.

Table 3 Noun-verb triads

Process Participant

Repeated movement in oneSingle movement in direction or bidirectional

Single movement in 1 direction reverse direction movement

Noun/gerundSecond verbFirst verbInherentlyreversibleaction Lexicalized Pseudo-lex. Lexicalized Pseudo-lex. Lexicalized Pseudo-lex.

Opening vs. OPEN- Open/separate SHUT- Shut flat surfaced WINDOW Window-shutting WINDOW flat surface WINDOW object opening

object(s)Clockwise vs. TURN-ON- Turn fist-sized TURN-OFF Turn fist-sized TAP Tap-turninganti-clockwise TAP object clockwise object anti-

clockwisePulling vs. OPEN- Pull two- CLOSE- Push two- DRAWER Pulling orpushing DRAWER handled object DRAWER handled object pushing

toward yourself away from handled objectwith two hands yourself with

two handsPutting on vs. PUT-ON- Put something TAKE- Take something RING Putting on ortaking off RING small on your OFF-RING small off your taking off a

finger finger ring-likeobject

movement in the nominal form can be viewed as amovement in each of the two directions one after theother or as a repetition (often more than simply once)of one of the movements in one of the directions. I sug-gest that the restrained repetition of the iconic move-ment (i.e., the mime) somehow “de-mimics” the actionwhile retaining the iconic link (cf. the discussion of re-strained movement in Johnston [1991a]). I also suggestthat, without any other participants being mentionedin a clause, and without any other modifications of themovement of the sign, the repeated form of overtlyiconic and inherently reversible movements is inter-preted as an object associated with the action (or morerarely, as a name for the action or process itself). Thesigns WINDOW, TAP, DRAWER, and RING are thethird element (the noun) of the four noun-verb triadslisted in Table 3.

The remaining good exemplars of repetition mark-ing for nominal status are all of the “engage/disen-gage” subtype, which, by their very nature, are dyadsor pairs, there being no meaningful second action inthe disengaging part of the cycle. Some are illustratedin Table 4.

Auslan thus appears to have some noun-verb triadsand dyads in which the nominal and verbal forms ofa sign are distinguished by some modification of themovement parameter of the underlying sign—singlefor verbs, repeated for nouns. Native signer intuitionssupport the notion that it is also highly likely that themovement quality varies in a predictable way in these


pairs—continuous or hold for verbs, and restrained fornouns—but the data from the TBAMS have not yetbeen analyzed for this. Significantly, the data suggestthat the pattern is best exemplified by signs with a cer-tain type of underlying iconicity: namely, inherentlyreversible concrete actions.

Mouthing

As reported above, mouthing was strongly associatedwith nominal signs. Indeed, more nominal signs in theelicited data set were accompanied by mouthing(69.9%) than displayed a repeated (and, presumably,restrained) movement pattern (57.2%). Of verbal signsin the elicited data, only 13.1% co-occurred withmouthing.

Ironically, the link of mouthing with “nominaliza-tion” was strengthened even when the co-articulatedsign was clearly verbal. In the majority of cases wherethere was mouthing accompanying the production ofa target verb, the mouthing named the object involvedin the action and not the action itself. Indeed, the twoverbal signs with the highest number of simultaneousmouthings (OPEN-UMBRELLA with 12 tokens andOPEN-DRAWER with 10 tokens) were almost alwaysaccompanied by a mouthing that named the object andnot the action. For example, the mouthing with the for-mer was “umbrella,” not “open,” and with the latter, itwas “drawer.”

Where the action itself was named through mouth-

Table 4 Noun-verb dyads

Process Participant

Verb Noun/gerund

Disengagingmovement in

Engaging movement in 1 direction reverse direction Repeated movement in one direction

Underlying action Lexicalized Pseudo-lex. Meaningless action Lexicalized Pseudo-lex.

Engaging SHOOT-GUN Pull or squeeze GUN Shooting(flicking/ on somethingsqueezing) vs. with your fingerdisengaging TAKE- Push down on PHOTOGRAPH Photographing(releasing) PHOTOGRAPH something with Photography

your fingerFLICK- Push down on LIGHTER Lighting upLIGHTER something with

your thumb

the TBAMS—if these target verbal forms were notjuxtaposed next to the strongly lexicalized nominalform, it would actually be unclear to the interlocutorwhat specific action was being referred to. By “lexicallyweak,” I mean that the verbal sign may itself have ageneral meaning, conveying little more than a signer ofAuslan would read into the conventionalized iconicityof its component parameters, and thus read into theconventionalized iconicity of the resulting sign com-plex as a whole, when the sign was performed alone orout of context.

The distribution of juxtaposition across targetverbs was itself uneven. When individual target signswere examined, the association of the phenomenon ofjuxtaposition with individual target verbs rather thannouns becomes much clearer (see Figure 6). Six targetverbs (CLOSE-WINDOW, PUT-ON-RING, FLICK-LIGHTER, OPEN-UMBRELLA, OPEN-BOOK,and PICK-UP-BAG) were juxtaposed with relatednominal signs by the majority of participants (but noneby more than 18 out of 25 informants). The remainderof the juxtaposed target verbs were found with a mi-nority of signers only: 3 signs (OPEN-CUPBOARD,SHOOT-GUN, and OPEN-DOOR) had 10 or 9 to-kens of juxtaposition, and 11 signs had fewer than 6tokens, most with only 3, 2, or 1. Only one target verb(TURN-KNOB) was not juxtaposed with a relatednominal sign by any participant.

The result in the latter case is less surprising if oneknows the context. Many signers did not recognize theobject in the stimulus film (it was an old-fashionedstove) or did not know what the object being turnedwas called in English (“a knob”). This is precisely thereason why the nominal sign received the lowestscore for mouthing—virtually none of the participantsknew what the object was called in English; and this isalso perhaps the reason why not one participant both-ered with a juxtaposed nominalization in this environ-ment. It would have added nothing more to an alreadyvague clause: “he turned the turn-thingummybob” isno improvement on “he turned (something)” or “hetwisted his hand while holding (something).”

Juxtaposition of a nominal and a verbal form of anoun-verb triad or pair in text thus seems a relativelyfrequent phenomenon in Auslan, but a large corpus ofnatural text is required to establish in which environ-ments it is favored, and why.


ing while the verbal sign was being performed, it wasnever by more than 6 out of 25 informants. Finally, theword “open” was used to name (mouth) five separateactions made with five different signs. It would there-fore seem that, in the majority of cases of verbalmouthing, the phenomenon is really a simultaneousarticulation of two elements: a verbal one manually anda nominal one on the mouth. In other words, in theelicited Auslan data, mouthing is strongly associatedwith “nominalization,” even when co-occuring with averb.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition did not occur as frequently as might havebeen expected from my preliminary observations(1989b), and there were plenty of examples wherenominal and verbal signs had the expected archetypicalnumber of movements associated with each sign classwithout any juxtaposition of both forms in the samesentence. We can rule out the speculation that juxtapo-sition might be the most favored environment for thesesign forms to occur in, even in connected discourse.

However, though this proved not to be the case,juxtaposition itself did tend to occur in one particularenvironment. On examining the elicited data, I foundsomething unexpectedly distinctive about the immedi-ate syntactic environment of a number of target verbs.Namely, a significant percentage of verbs were juxta-posed within the elicited response immediately next totheir derivationally related noun (some 28% of targetverbs were juxtaposed with a related nominal formwhereas only 6% of target nouns were similarly juxta-posed). For example, the sign often glossed as OPEN-WINDOW is somewhat of a misnomer and actuallyreally means (following Table 3) something much moregeneral, such as “open/separate flat surfaced object(s)”(which I gloss below as OPEN-FLAT). The meaningof the sign is only fully specified by giving it a context:

1. WINDOW OPEN-FLAT : the window opened,the open window, the window was opened.

2. TWO #WOOD CL:C-HORIZONTAL-SLATS OPEN-FLAT : the two wooden slats sepa-rated, etc.

I suggest that this pattern reflects the “weak” lexi-calization of some of the Auslan target verbs used in

Case 2: Data From the Auslan Lexical Database

In 1997, after all the data collected for the Auslan dic-tionaries had been entered into a computer database,we could at last appreciate the number of noun-verbpairs in the language, albeit with the qualification thatany statistical profile of the lexicon of Auslan must bebiased in favor of those signs and sign forms that havebeen collected and entered into the database. Nonethe-less, data on the number of noun signs and verb signsthat display the number of movements believed to indi-cate the inflectional and derivational morphology ofnouns and verbs in Auslan do provide a basis for com-parison with data from the structured elicitation tasksof the TBAMS and from observations made of ASL(Launer, 1982; Supalla & Newport, 1978).

There are several databases of Auslan signs. Thelargest database has approximately 8,000 records andincludes all known lexical signs, phonological variants,regional signs (and their phonological variants), spe-cialist and technical signs (including religious signs),proper names (such as countries and Australian citiesand states), signs used in the Australasian Signed En-glish system, recent loan signs (primarily from ASL),general pseudo-lexicalized signs, archaic and obsoletesigns, and, finally, signs whose lexical status is doubtfulor undetermined. For the type of comparison soughthere, the smaller Auslan lexical database used in theproduction of the Signs of Australia CD-ROM (John-ston, 1997), consisting of 3,962 entries, was consulted.This database records core signs found in Auslan—itdoes not include most phonological and regional vari-ants, signs from the Australasian Signed English sys-tem, recent lexical borrowings or coinages (as oftenfound in teaching and educational interpreting situa-tions), or general, archaic, obsolete, or doubtful signs(see Johnston & Schembri [1999] for a detailed discus-sion of lexicalization in Auslan).

Case 2: Method

The database was searched to determine the numberand type of signs that, in their canonical or citationform, required a repeated movement. In this way,I hoped to see if there were indeed strong associationsof repeated movements with a particular sign class,


namely, nouns. One would expect this if the patternobserved in some Auslan signs, as evidenced in theTBAMS data, was the reflection of a system of inflec-tional and derivational noun-verb morphology in thelanguage. The number of signs in the Signs of Australiadatabase with repeated movements was compared tothe number of signs without repeated movements in anumber of categories.

Case 2: Results

First, I found that 20% of the total signs in the data-base were described as having a repeated movement.When compared to the total number of signs markedas verbs (2,738) and the total number of signs markedas nouns (3,290), one sees that 545 (20%) of verbs dis-played repetition, compared with 729 (22%) of nouns.Neither category differed significantly from the otheror with the rate of repetition in citation signs across thedatabase (see Figure 9).

However, Auslan signs often do not belong to asingle sign class exclusively—many appear to functionas both nouns and verbs and are thus coded in the data-base as belonging to both parts of speech without anyapparent change in form. Indeed, 2,234 signs in thedatabase are coded as belonging to both the noun andverb sign classes. Of these, 472 (21%) are described ashaving a repeated movement pattern. Again, this per-centage does not differ significantly from that of allsigns with a repeated movement in the database.

Signs that are exclusively nouns (1,056 tokens), ex-clusively verbs (504 tokens), and signs that are neithernouns or verbs (adverbs, connectives, etc.) (168 tokens)had slightly differing percentages of repeated move-ment in the citation form. In Figure 9, one can see thatthe percentage of repeated forms in each of theseclasses was 24% for “noun only,” and only 15% for“verb only” and 14% for “neither.” Apparently, thereis some kind of association of repetition with nominals,even if it is not pronounced.

Case 2: Discussion

It is always possible that in the design of the database,in the collection of signs, in the consultation with in-formants, and, finally, in the transcription of signs

signs that can have more than one sign class member-ship. (If repetition as a nominalization morpheme werea real and productive feature of the language, thensigns assigned exclusively to the nominal and verbalparts of speech might be expected to show this mostclearly—nouns having more repeated forms thanverbs.)

As we saw, there was a slightly higher percentage ofnoun signs that had a repeated movement pattern thaneither verbs or other sign classes. The ratio of signs thathad a repeated movement to those that did not have arepeated movement appeared to roughly approximate1:5 in each of the possible sets of comparisons that weremade, except the “noun only” category. Here, the num-ber of signs that function only as nouns and might besaid to use repetition “as a marker of their nominal sta-tus” was closer to 1:4 (24%).

However, the number of potential noun-verb pairsin the database may be low (and hence the correlationof single movement with verbs and repetition withnouns may also be weak) because the verbal forms of agiven noun with repeated movement often appear to besigns that are not lexicalized or are so general in mean-ing that they did not qualify for entry into the lexical


themselves, differences in production when a givensign functions as a noun as opposed to a verb, such asrepeated versus single movement, have not been codedor even noticed. If the difference in movement parame-ter should be quite subtle, such as the quality of themovement (restrained versus continuous) rather thanthe number of movements (single versus repeated),such omissions can be even more pronounced.

Only a tally of signs with repeated movement couldbe made with respect to the Auslan lexical database.The transcription of signs in the database did not con-sistently code for continuous or restrained movement,so I was unable to search on this criteria and hence de-termine if the quality, rather than the number, of move-ments was strongly associated with citation nouns andverbs. It thus remains a possibility that restrainedmovement is, in fact, strongly associated with nomi-nalization, but I am unable to show this due to the con-straints of the database.

Returning to the relevant movement features codedin the database, namely, repetition, one might expectthat the frequency of repeated form in signs marked asexclusively nouns or verbs in the database might leadto a clearer picture than comparisons with respect to

Figure 9 Percentage of types of signs that have repeated movement in the citation form asrecorded in the lexical database for the Auslan dictionary Signs of Australia.

database. If this is true, the frequency of repetition en-tailing nominalization might not be quite as low as itappears. Unfortunately, there is no data available at thistime to determine if this is indeed a factor in the distri-bution in the database. Overall, and with qualificationsunderstood, the comparison of signs from the lexicaldatabase does not suggest that “repetition” alone is aproductive nominal derivational process in Auslan,though it seems well established within the set ofhighly mimetic signs with inherently reversible actions.

Case 3: Data Comparing Noun-Verb Pairs andOther Lexical Signs in Auslan and ASL

I suggested above in the discussion of the TBAMS datathat the putative inflectional and derivational morphol-ogy of nouns and verbs in Auslan, based on originalobservations of ASL by Supalla and Newport (1978),appears to be highly correlated with signs having anunderlying inherently reversible iconic movement. Su-palla and Newport (1978) identified 100 noun-verbpairs in ASL in which they claimed all the nominalforms of the underlying signs displayed a repeated andrestrained movement. To test the suggestion that thereis an underlying “open and shut” iconicity in thesenoun-verb pairs, I decided to compare the lexical over-lap of this set of signs in Auslan and ASL with the lexi-cal overlap between Auslan and ASL signs generally, asI have estimated (in press).

Case 3: Method

The methods for the comparison of Auslan and ASLsigns generally are outlined in detail in Johnston (inpress). Briefly, the comparison shown here wasachieved by selecting each of the 1,600 signs from theASL Handshape Dictionary (Tennant & Brown, 1998)and searching for a formationally and semanticallyequivalent Auslan sign in the Auslan dictionaries(Johnston, 1997, 1998). Signs were classified as “iden-tical,” “similar or related,” or “different.” The basis ofdiscrimination of similarity and difference was on thefour major parameters of sign formation: handshape,location, movement, and orientation. Facial and othernonmanual features were disregarded. When all fourparameters were the same in both comparison signs,they were treated as identical. If the signs differed in


only one parameter, they were classified as similar orrelated. If they differed in two or more parameters,they were classified as different.

For the comparison of noun-verb pairs in the twosigned languages, the signs identified by Supalla andNewport were located in a number of ASL dictionariesor elicited from native ASL signers and compared totheir Auslan equivalents as signed by native Auslansigners. They were categorized using the same criteriaas set out above.

Case 3: Results

I show (in press) that, overall, 31% to 34% of ran-domly selected signs between ASL and Auslan areidentical in form and meaning (with a further 8% to13% being similar or related). For the 1,600 signs re-corded in the ASL Handshape Dictionary (Tennant &Brown, 1998), the figures were 31% identical and 7%similar (see Figure 10). Ratios of the same order werefound when signs based on the Swadesh list of 100 ba-sic concepts modified for use with sign languages(Woodward, 1978) were compared. (Signs matchingglosses from the Swadesh list were identified and com-pared in both sign languages.)

In comparison, the 100 noun-verb pairs in Auslanand ASL lexicons reveal a startling overlap. A massive73% of the 100 underlying forms related to each of the100 noun-verb pairs in ASL are also Auslan signs withthe same meaning. A further 14% of these signs aresimilar—they may not be lexicalized in Auslan as theymay be in ASL, but in context could easily be usedwith a similar meaning. In other words, 86% of thesigns are cognate. Only 13% of the noun-verb pairswere lexically distinct in Auslan—the language havingno lexical sign for the concept and/or having a quitedifferent and unrelated sign. There is thus somethingmost unusual about the list of 100 ASL noun-verbpairs. The dramatic increase in overlap between thetwo languages in this list appears to be symptomatic ofthe iconicity of these signs.

Case 3: Discussion

Within the set of 100 noun-verb pairs, 37% of the ver-bal members of the pairs have a repeated movementthemselves and thus must be distinguished from the

saw, only 24% of “noun only” signs have a repeatedmovement compared to 15% of “verb only”—a ratioof under 2:1. Moreover, if signer intuitions using thelist of 100 supposed noun-verb pairs are any reliableindication, the pattern appears to weaken quickly be-yond signs based on highly mimetic, inherently revers-ible actions.

In addition, the test elicitation set is itself a subsetof the list of 100 noun-verb pairs. All of the items in theoriginal ASL test battery were necessarily from pairs inwhich the verb has a single movement and the nounhas a repeated movement in order to maximize thedifference between nominal and verbal forms. Of 20noun-verb pairs, all but two pairs (FLY-IN-PLANEand TAKE-OFF-ROCKET) were based on inherentlyreversible actions in both languages. Precisely thesetwo signs (and, inexplicably, UMBRELLA) fell out-side the expected pattern in the Auslan data.

Grammaticalization of Noun-Verb Markingin Auslan

The data elicited through the TBAMS and presentedin this article confirm the existence of formationally re-lated noun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb dis-plays a single movement and the noun displays a re-peated movement. Although the TBAMS does elicit anumber of examples consistent with the notion that


nominal member of the pair through the quality ofmovement alone—continuous or hold for the verb, re-strained for the noun. Supalla and Newport claim thatin all of these pairs the nouns have a repeated and re-strained movement. With respect to this set of signs,then, there is a clear association of repetition withnouns. The ratio of repeated nouns to repeated verbsin the citation form is 3:1.

There is some recorded data using this set of 100noun-verb pairs to elicit Auslan nouns and verbs. Theintuitions of native signers suggest that the majority ofthe members of the list would be cited with the ex-pected canonical nominal and verbal forms as pre-dicted by Supalla and Newport for ASL. However, asLauner (1982) also found for ASL, some of the listedpairs are not strongly associated with any particularsign forms (i.e., they are weakly lexicalized) and the re-sponses are variable. For others, the responses were stillvariable, even though a recognized lexical sign existedfor the concept.

If this marking for nominal and verbal signs is notjust a feature of this select list of highly mimetic signsand has in fact become grammaticalized as a regularmorphological marker in the language, one would ex-pect the ratio of “noun only” signs with a repeatedmovement to “verb only” signs with a repeated move-ment to be of a similar order in the Auslan lexicon as awhole. This appears to be only marginally so. As we

Figure 10 Percentage of shared signs between ASL and Auslan in three lexical sets.

nominals within this paradigm are also constrained inmovement and verbs have a continuous or hold move-ment pattern, the quality, as well as the quantity, ofmovements was not coded for in this study. Generallyspeaking, however, it appears to be uncontroversial toclaim that most repeated movements result in a re-strained movement quality.

Significantly, the data also suggest that these appar-ently derivationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslanare almost all exclusively part of a distinct set of iconic(mimetic) signs archetypically based on inherentlyreversible actions (such as opening and shutting).Though it is common cross-linguistically that deriva-tional processes are of restricted productivity, in Auslan(and possibly by extension ASL), this derivational pro-cess is not highly productive or systematic and is alsooverwhelmingly restricted in its application to this lim-ited set of mimetic signs. I suggest that this “open andshut” set of highly mimetic lexical signs is relativelysmall (the Supalla and Newport list of 100 noun-verbpairs may in fact be fairly exhaustive) and that the pat-tern of noun-verb pairing breaks down rapidly outsidethis set of signs.

Moreover, even given the qualified existence of der-ivationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan, it isquestionable that the distinction or marking is regu-larly made in normal connected discourse. The initialobservations of the existence of noun-verb pairs inASL by Supalla and Newport were based on the pro-duction of citation signs, often in pairs. Native Auslansigner intuitions, elicited data from the TBAMS, andpreliminary observation of recorded Auslan texts sug-gest that in normal connected discourse this markingis often not made or is manifested with much morevariability than the citation lists would suggest. Launer(1982, p. 210) makes a similar observation for ASLnoun-verb pairs. A highly selected set of ideal noun-verb exemplars in ASL was shown to elicit accurate re-sponses in only 67% of cases (Launer, 1982). The sameset, adapted for Auslan, yielded 68% of responses thatfollowed the expected pattern.

The fact that slightly more target nouns were ac-companied by mouthing than displayed repeatedmovement tends to suggest that the formationaldifference observed when nouns and verbs are pro-duced in their citation forms (and then often as part ofa juxtaposed pair) is not the only or primary way to


distinguish nouns from verbs in Auslan. Besides thepossible role of restrained movement (on which thereare no data at this stage), other possible strategies forestablishing the grammatical sign class, and thus func-tion, of signs in context include the context of utter-ance and the co-text, sign order and syntax, nonmanualfeatures (e.g., facial adverbials that can only co-occurwith verbals), and, as just mentioned, the mouthing ofEnglish words.

The differential marking of nominal and verbalforms is also seen to occur often in environments of“juxtaposition” (the two forms co-occuring in a phrase,immediately next to each other). This juxtaposition ap-pears to be related to the pseudo-lexical status of somepaired verbal signs. (As mentioned above, though repe-tition is strongly associated with many lexical nouns,the paired single continuous movement form of thesesigns, though verbal, is often not strongly lexicalized,or lexicalized at all.)

Thus, there is an association between repeatedmovement and nominal signs. Not surprisingly, it isquite strong and marked within the set of signs thathave been identified on this very basis, but most ofthese signs also share a fundamental “open and shut”iconicity. The association appears to be quite weakacross the lexicon—there are far more signs in the lexi-cal database in every category, including “nouns only,”that do not have a repeated movement pattern.

Despite these observations, the data do show thatthe putative derivational process is of limited produc-tivity outside the iconic set, having spread to a numberof forms that appear to have no “open and shut” ico-nicity whatsoever. (However, examples are limited andinformants are much more likely to disagree on accept-ability.) It even appears that in some cases the phono-logical feature that has been “transferred” from the“open and shut” set to other signs is the restrainedmovement pattern alone (the result of repeating a signrapidly), rather than the repetition itself. For example,some noun-verb pairs in the language appear to be dis-tinguished through quality of movement alone, withoutrepetition (PLANE and FLY-IN-PLANE, BOAT andGO-IN-BOAT, COAT and PUT-ON-COAT). Thedata collected from the TBAMS were not coded for thedistinction between nouns and verbs made on this basisalone, so there are no data to support this speculation.

Grammatical sign class is intrinsically a syntactic

guistic expression found in a sign language. In W. H. Ed-mondson & R. B. Wilbur (Eds.), International review of signlinguistics (pp. 57–94). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Johnston, T. (1997). Signs of Australia on CD-ROM: A dictionaryof Auslan. Sydney: North Rocks Press. Johnston, T. (1998).Signs of Australia: a new dictionary of Auslan. Sydney: NorthRocks Press.

Johnston, T. (in press). BSL, Auslan and NZSL: Three signedlanguages or one? In A. Baker (Ed.), Seventh InternationalConference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research.Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.

Johnston, T., & A. Schembri. (1999). On defining lexeme in asign language. Sign Language & Linguistics, 2(1), 115–185.

Launer, P. B. (1982). “A plane” is not “to fly”: Acquiring the dis-tinction between related nous and verbs in ASL. Unpub-lished doctoral dissertation, The City College of New York.

Lentz, E. M., Mikos, K., & Smith, C. (1988). Signing naturally:Teacher’s curriculum guide, level 1. Berkeley, CA: DawnSignPress.

Schembri, A. (1996). The structure and formation of signs in Auslan(Australian Sign Language). Sydney: North Rocks Press.

Schembri, A., Adam, R., Wigglesworth, G., Johnston, T., Leigh,G., & Barker, R. (1997). The Test Battery for Australian SignLanguage (Auslan) Morphology and Syntax. Unpublishedvideotape, Macquarie University, Australia.

Schembri, A., Wigglesworth, G., Johnston, T., Leigh, G., Adam,R., & Barker, R. (2000). The Test Battery for Australian SignLanguage Morphology and Syntax Project: Noun-verbpairs in Auslan. In A. Schembri, J. Napier, R. Beattie, & G.Leigh, eds., Selected papers from the Australasian Deaf StudiesResearch Symposium, Renwick College, August 22–23, 1998(pp. 99–118). Sydney: North Rocks Press.

Schembri, A., Wigglesworth, G., Johnston, T., Leigh, G., Adam,R., & Barker, R. (in press). Issues in the development of theTest Battery for Australian Sign Language (Auslan) Mor-phology and Syntax. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Edu-cation.

Supalla, T., & Newport, E. L. (1978). How many seats in a chair?The derivation of nouns & verbs in American Sign Lan-guage. In P. Siple (Ed.), Understanding language through signlanguage research (pp. 91–132). New York: Academic Press.

Supalla, T., Newport, E., Singleton, J., Supalla, S., Metlay, D., &Coulter, G. (in press). The Test Battery for American SignLanguage Morphology and Syntax. San Diego: DawnSignPress.

Tennant, R. A., & Brown, M. G. (1998). The American Sign Lan-guage handshape dictionary. Washington, DC: Clerc Books,Gallaudet University Press.

Woodward, J. C. (1978). Historical bases of American Sign Lan-guage. In P. Siple (Ed.), Understanding language through signlanguage research (pp. 333–348). New York: Academic Press.


concept; thus, the status of a derivational morphologi-cal process that purportedly changes the grammaticalsign class of a sign must be qualified if its best exem-plars are actually one or two sign utterances, such asin the listing of citation signs (alone or paired), or indisambiguations and repairs (the signer is actually say-ing “FLY, NOT PLANE”). If, in addition, the mani-festation of this process is highly variable in connecteddiscourse both in the language output of a single signerand across a number of signers, all native signers, onemust be doubly cautious. Overall, it would seem thederivational process is still very closely linked to aniconic base, is incipient in the grammar of Auslan, andis thus best described as only partially grammati-calized. The controlled elicited data from the TBAMSwill need to be complemented by analyses of a corpusof naturalistic Auslan texts before a definitive answercan be given on the linguistic status of this process inthe language. The status and role of noun/verb mor-phology, in Auslan at least, is far from being the openand shut case that some sign language educators orcourse books imply.

Received December 13, 2000; revision received February 28,2001; accepted March 5, 2001

References

Johnston, T. (1987). A general introduction to Australian Sign Lan-guage (Auslan). Adelaide: TAFE National Centre for Re-search and Development.

Johnston, T. (1989a). Auslan dictionary: A dictionary of the signlanguage of the Australian deaf community. Sydney: DeafnessResources Australia.

Johnston, T. (1989b). Auslan: The sign language of the Australiandeaf community. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Univer-sity of Sydney.

Johnston, T. (1991a). Spatial syntax and spatial semantics in theinflection of signs for the marking of person and location inAuslan. International Journal of Sign Linguistics, 2(1), 29–62.

Johnston, T. (1991b). Transcription and glossing of sign lan-guage texts: Examples from Auslan (Australian Sign Lan-guage). International Journal of Sign Linguistics, 2(1), 3–28.

Johnston, T. (1996). Function and medium in the forms of lin-

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