THE ROLE OF AGREEMENT AND AUXILIARIES IN SIGN LANGUAGE

A number of scholars in a variety of sign languages (Smith, 1990: Taiw an Sign Language; Bos, 1994: Sign Language of the Netherlands; Engberg -Pedersen, 1993: Danish Sign Language) have recently found auxiliary o r auxiliary-like structures which serve to carry agreement, usually wh en the main verb does not. I have found a similar phenomenon in Japane se Sign Language (JSL). Other papers in this issue address the linguis tic status of agreement and the auxiliaries to which it attaches. I wo uld like to approach the problem from a somewhat orthogonal perspectiv e. Although I have suggested elsewhere that verb agreement is derived historically from clitic pronouns, I assume the conclusion of the othe r papers that agreement is indeed an inflection and not a clitic prono un. I turn the question around and address the issue of whether some i ndexical pronouns in JSL are in fact manifestations of agreement as ar gued by Torigoe (1994) (I argue in the negative), suggest the beginnin gs of a theoretically coherent account of the auxiliaries in JSL, and discuss questions of universality in both language and gesture.