ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, American Sign Language (ASL) research had made significant progress in demonstrating that ASL is not a nonlinguistic system of gesture but a language built on universal grammatical principles shared by all human languages. The signs o f ASL had been shown to be composed of the equivalents o f phonemes (Stokoe, 1960, Stokoe, Casterline, & Croneberg, 1965), the signs themselves were shown to not be completely iconic (Klima, Bellugi et al., 1979), and to have evolved in consistent ways over time (Frishberg, 1975, Woodward, 1974, 1976). However, classifier predicates remained a challenge. They were the most highly iconic signs, whose forms (handshapes, locations, and movements) appeared to vary with the continuous variation in the world event that they represented. To ask a native signer the meaning o f a slight variation in a verb o f motion, for example swerving a car to avoid potholes, the signer could only say that the sign zigzagged to depict that motion in the actual event. And yet a hallmark of human languages is that they represent real world events using discrete rather than continuous forms. Do classifier predicates mark the point where ASL diverges from other human languages, and lapses into the all-too-available gestural capacity o f the visual medium to communicate these spatial events?
