Back to back(wards) and moving on: on agreement, auxiliaries and verb classes in sign languages
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The standard tripartite classification of sign language verbs (Padden 1983/1988) relies on the assumption that the agreement shown by spatial and agreement verbs is of a different kind: while the former display locative agreement (i.e. with the loci associated with locative arguments), the latter agree morphologically with subject and object arguments (that is, with the loci linked to their referents). Still, both spatial predicates expressing motion and agreement verbs resort to the same type of morphological element to realize the allegedly different sort of agreement: PATH (Meir 1998; DIR in Meir 2002). The semantic contribution of this morpheme in the two classes would be essentially the same: in spatial verbs the initial and final slots of PATH are aligned with locations and in agreement verbs they are aligned with subject and object loci. Since agreement verbs seem to denote transfer of a theme either in a literal or in an abstract sense, the semantic generalization is established that the slots of the directional PATH morpheme can be assigned the source and goal theta-roles in both classes of predicates (Fischer & Gough 1975). For spatial verbs, this is quite straightforward; foragreement verbs, source and goal are restricted to [+human], so they can be relabelled as agent and benefactive, respectively.