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With gestures they could have begun language-not "protolanguage"-but the real thing. . . . Although some may still believe that language has never been other than spoken and heard, the fact remains that the configuration and movement of the hands and arms can resemble the appearance of things and their actions. Language needs both subjects and predicates, and gestures of this kind (not coincidentally) have two analogous parts.
W. C. Stokoe and M. Marschark
THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES the predicative verbal system of Catalan Sign Language (LSC) as it is used by Deaf people in the province of Barcelona.1 We also present a historical perspective of the research on this topic, which provides insight into the changes that have taken place over the last few decades in sign language linguistics. The principal differences between these languages and oral ones include the visual character of their linguistic units and the use of the space in front of the signer (neutral space) to describe events of the real world. This space is broadly exploited in the verb structure, which constitutes a complex gestural form that accumulates most of the information in the sentence and the discourse as a whole. For this reason, since the 1970s, descriptions of these verb systems have attracted the attention of numerous researchers.
Sign language linguistics, which began in the 1960s, was based on the formalist grammatical categories developed for oral languages and adopted some of the main theoretical presumptions of the linguistic models of the time. However, in the 1990s, the rise of functionalist and cognitive perspectives had a major influence on some of the most recent descriptions; consequently, the initial assumptions are now being reexamined. This theoretical change has also affected the study of predicative structure.
Preliminary works on verb typology were conducted in the 1970s.2 Among them, especially in the initial years, are Friedman (1975), Fischer and Cough (1978), and Padden (1983). Earlier works include Padden (1990), Liddell (1990, 1994, 1998, 20003, 2000b, 2003a, 2003b), Liddell and Metzger (1998), Valli and Lucas (1996), Engberg-Pedersen (1993), Wallin (1994), and Meir (1998, 2002), some of which are critical reviews of the pioneering works. For Latin American sign languages, see Massone and Machado (1994), Fridman-Mintz (1996), Dominguez (1998), and Oviedo (2003), all of whom...